[ 04-23-03 ] [ 5:11 p.m.]
[ You make a difference? ]

Chad loves to say this one phrase that usually bugs the hell out of me.

"You make a difference."

But lately, between him annoying me to death by saying that, and the things going on in all my classes, I've been thinking in perspective.

Something that has always spoken to me as a child is shouting at me now. When I was little, I used to go outside, look up at the stars, and try to count them all. When I couldn't count them all without messing up, I would just pick one, and stare at it. And I promised myself I would get there someday.

When I got a little older, I began to think about how many more stars there must be that I can't see. I would squint my eyes and try to stare further into that blackness than I could, imagining a star or a galaxy there. And I promised myself I'd get there someday.

When I got a little older still, I learned that it's not possible to visit another star in the span of a human life, even if we had the technology to do so. So I went outside and stared at the moon and imagined what it would be like up there. And I promised myself I'd get there someday.

But, inevitably, I stopped promising myself that someday I was going to get there. The fascination I had with space was lost.

Until a few short months ago.

As soon as I got into Astronomy class, I started thinking about those childhood promises and connecting them with the knowledge of space I currently possess. I've never been a math person, but the equation I came up with is something like this:

I'm one person out of six billion. On a tiny planet. Orbiting an average star. In an average galaxy consisting of some 100 billion stars. In a universe with more than 300 billion galaxies alone. And some scientists have their theories that this universe is one of only billions.

Makes you feel small, doesn't it?

And so I thought, with that feeling of inferiority in mind, what's the point? How can one tiny molecule in this great unknown thing make any difference at all? On Earth alone, if I up and die suddenly, there's only about, maybe, 2 to 3 thousand people that would even know I existed.

Makes you feel smaller yet, doesn't it?

And that's how the whole cycle of life goes. Somebody's born, does some stuff, and dies. It repeats itself. The stars do it. The galaxies do it. Even the universe does it.

So why bother?

Oh, that's right: because for your brief, flashing, 15 nanoseconds of life, you might actually do something that means something to someone.

I will likely never see my name on the flight patch of a shuttle mission. This is a fact of my life that I've almost come to accept. Even though, as a little girl, I watched astronauts board their shuttles, and I would kiss the t.v. screen and call them my heroes, the fact of it is that I may never have some little boy or girl look at that t.v. screen and call me their hero.

That certainly doesn't mean that someone else won't be that hero to those same little boys and girls.

And that certainly doesn't mean that just because I won't ever go into space, that I can't try.

I guess that's why people are greedy, selfish, and stuck-up a lot of times. Somebody's just trying to be somebody. Nobody wants to be nobody.

But when you think about it, we're all nobody anyway, because there's something out there a lot greater than us, you know? Something we'll never reach, something we'll never find, something we can't even comprehend.

We're smaller than molecules in the human body.

So, again: what's the point?

The point is that even small molecules can matter.

I bet tomorrow I'll walk into history class to Chad smiling and uttering four words that usually get on my nerves. But tomorrow, I'll probably have a different perspective on those words, because, if you really think about it, they're true.

You make a difference.