Sometimes it is about the big stuff

I went back into the office today and given we moved home over Christmas it was my first commute on the bus.

It is on the X43 now that you ask and it’s a nice way to go to work, very comfortable and pretty quick into Manchester. #Witchway

Anyway, part way through my journey I saw the sun rise and I was momentarily absorbed in the sheer beauty of it.

In my photography and writing, I try to focus on paying attention to the small stuff I suppose. The brush strokes on the image of the wooden giraffe in my gallery for example. So I might normally consider a sunrise to be ‘the big stuff’!

This morning, though my mind was prepared to go bigger, a lot bigger. I began to consider what the sunrise really is, the mechanics of our movement around the sun and our place in the solar system. It’s mad, the solar system is enormous and if we look beyond our own solar system the scale is incomprehensible.

We gaze up at the stars at night and admire them yet we sit around 93 million miles from a star every day, one we can admire as it appears and disappears over the horizon of earth.

Now that is big stuff and I feel it deserves our awe.

Note: Just for a sense of scale I looked it up and it would take a manned rocket about 160 days to reach the sun from earth. It would take the same rocket about 90,000 years to reach the nearest star (sun) other than our own.