Special Relationship

As I keep pondering special relativity to help my second novel (which is coming along well enough that I haven't been posting lately), I can't help but wonder at our seemingly insurmountable differences.

They appear, from a cosmic perspective, so insignificant.

Consider...

I'm standing in my kitchen sipping coffee and watching the neighboring squirrel play tag with a Stellar jay (ie a blue jay with a black head) for five minutes.  I appear not to be moving, right?

However, we all know that I am.  For the planet is rotating, west to east (making the sun appear to "rise" each morning).  That means that even though I haven't moved a step in the kitchen (their game of tag really is kind of fun to watch), I have moved five minutes along the direction of the earth's rotation.  As if someone had grabbed a marker and traced it out on the surface of a beach ball.

Then, too, during those same five minutes, the earth is revolving around the sun, counterclockwise.  So, it has gone its five minutes worth of travel.  That means I've been rotating as well as revolving without even realizing it.

The solar system, itself?  Yes, that, too, is slowly rotating, along with the sun, counter-clockwise.   (Why?  It's an artifact of how the solar system originally formed.  It's still going in the same direction as the earliest gases that spun off.)

And, of course, our solar system is orbiting around the entire Milky Way galaxy.  In fact, the guessing goes that the last time we were where we are now, in the galaxy, dinosaurs were roaming the planet and us, nary a twinkle in their eye.

(Begs the question, doesn't it?  Who will be roaming around the earth the next time we are at this same position in the galaxy?)

Beyond that, the entire Milky Way rotates as well.  Though, being rather flat, which direction - clockwise or counter - depends on which side you're looking at.  And, the galaxy, too, is moving...

All this said, with all this movement occurring in those same five minutes that I am sipping coffee (and most definitely not working on my novel), doesn't it make me feel small?  Sure does.

So small that I can't help but wonder at the differences that supposedly exist between us - those supposedly insurmountable ones between family, neighbors, colleagues, nations, even religions - that all too often separate us irreconcilably for a lifetime or more.

The differences seem so puny compared to all this movement.  Makes you wonder why we put so much effort into them.

But maybe that's just a matter of perspective...