sources of comfort

Back in high school, I developed a marvellous way of calming my anxieties. With this method, burdensome and insurmountable problems seemed to acquire minimalistic dimensions.

Say I was stressed out during an examination, squeezed under the weight of my own perfectionism, felt insufficient because of societal expectations or sad because of an emotional event... I took a deep breath, and imagined my position on earth, earth's position in the solar system, solar system's position in the spiral arm Orion, Orion's position in the Milky Way, and so on...

Today I find refugee in the ignorances of the past generations. I do not go back too far. I imagine the people of 19th century. They did not know about DNA, black holes, computers etc. Today even the average guy on the street knows more about how nature operates than the most educated man of 18th century. The depth of our ignorance about nature is and will always be beyond astronomical scales. If you find the realization of the "insignificance of human condition" as comforting as I do, try meditating on that.