Can’t See the Forest for the Trees
A century ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble challenged the then current thinking that the Milky Way galaxy comprised the entire Universe. He postulated that the Andromeda “spiral nebula” was actually far outside the Milky Way galaxy. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, named for Edwin Hubble, and combining over 600 photos over a decade plus, astronomers have proved Hubble correct and have created a 417-megapixel panorama of the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest galaxy neighbor at 2.5 million light-years away, showing 200 million of its estimated trillion-star population! Or so says Jeremy Gray on www.petapixel.com.
Wow! What hits you in this paragraph? Nearest neighbor – a mere 1.5x10^19 miles away? (Bonus question: How many times would you have to drive the 1,000 miles from Minneapolis to Buffalo in 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles?) An estimated trillion stars (1,000,0000,000,000)? Or that Hubble had the guts to challenge current thinking? Willing to be regarded as a heretic, lunatic? Per Jeremy Gray, “Hubble’s discovery instantly transformed humanity’s understanding of the cosmos.”
“Without Andromeda as a proxy for spiral galaxies in the universe at large, astronomers would know much less about the structure and evolution of our own Milky Way. That’s because we are embedded inside the Milky Way. This is like trying to understand the layout of New York City by standing in the middle of Central Park,” NASA explains.
I’m thinking ”can’t see the forest for the trees.” You? www.bing.com adds (bolding is mine):
The expression “can’t see the forest for the trees” is used to describe a situation where someone is so focused on details or individual issues that they fail to see the bigger picture or overarching situation. It symbolizes being overly engrossed in the specifics and losing sight of the overarching situation. It symbolizes being overly engrossed in the specifics and losing sight of overall objectives or goals.
As I write this it is -21F outside with a “feels like temperature” of -36F, and my c,ar is an unstartable ice-cube of metal. My frantic mind is racing – about appointments I’m missing, impact to my well-planned “to-do list.” In this moment, I hear Hubble saying to breathe, ponder your place in the cosmic dance. Consider our Solar System’s star – the sun – how it shines and warms, continuously, whether I receive it OR whether I stand in the shade, in darkness.
This morning, as I watched the rising sun, from pre-dawn nautical twilight to its emerging above the horizon, I was mesmerized. Especially as the sun shone through my deck railing causing an expanding fan of light and shadow on the glistening snow. A convicting thought hit me: Are I able to see the forest for the trees or, like a spindle on a deck railing that blocks the sun’s warming rays, am I focusing on details or issues that prevent me from seeing the bigger cosmic picture?