Insignificantly Significant

This evening I went out to look at stars.  Yes, I realize it would have been easier to do so on Friday right after class and then had the whole weekend to write this.  But on Friday I could have been found in bed at 8:30, p.m. not a.m.  And in a similar pattern, the same thing happened Saturday night except that I fell asleep on the couch with my Anatomy and Physiology book nestled in my lap.  Therefore, as a product of elimination, I waited until tonight at seven to drive up near the hospital and look at the stars on the hill overlooking Bozeman.  It was breathtaking, not only was Bozeman lit up, but the stars were bright and the air was crisp.  The sight of stars reminded me of home.  In fact as Autumn and I sat on a bench looking out across the hill towards Bozeman then looked back at the sky, we reminisced of a summer two years ago where she, her cousin, and I had sat in the field behind my house and watched as shooting star after shooting star had passed overhead.  Tonight was different, though.  We sat with our hot chocolate I had packed in coffee mugs, huddled first over my phone trying to find the Callisto and Arcus, then excitedly pointing at the different stars.  We found Callisto easily but had a harder time trying to pick out Arcus. 

We then moved over to see Orion and his belt and sword. Throughout the pointing and laughing as I especially tried to make shapes from random bundles of stars, the laughter and lightness continued.  The conversation soon turned deeper, though.  What started as memories of past nights turned into deeper subjects of the future and our outlook on life.  We started to talk about how each of us had changed in the past few years.  

One of the things I had discovered, or maybe just uncovered a little more, this weekend, was how everything is connected.  In another one of my classes, my homework for the weekend was to do peer evaluations on leadership skills for every one of my classmates.  As I looked through the categories, it surprised me on how much I was basing their skills not only on how they conducted themselves in the class and lab environment, but how they conducted themselves outside of class and personally as well.  There is no separation of personal life from your professional life.  How you conduct yourself in one area will reflect in the other.  Especially in a small town or college campus where everyone knows everyone else, just like in the town I grew up in.  I had also been talking about this with a classmate from a different class as we studied my Anatomy and Physiology material for an upcoming test.  She agreed with me, saying that your personal and private life together makes your reputation.  Decisions you make affect everyone around you.
 






Growing up, my dad always referred to it as the ripple affect.  A decision you make affects the person next to you and moves to the people next to them and so on and so forth.  Whether good or bad decision, it will cause an impact on the people and environment around you.  A question posed by the classmate from above as we studied cells from the body was what if we, ourselves, are parts of a larger cell that makes up the universe.  Over the past few weeks, this class has covered the levels of organization in the body, starting from atoms and moving to an organism, also learning that cells are the most basic living structures in the body.  If cells make up the body in an organized manner, why can't we make up a cell that makes up the universe?  After she had asked this question, both I and the other person there stopped what we were doing to ponder this.  What if this was true? What if everything we do effects the "cell" we live in.  If we make wrong decisions, we cause the chance of the cell becoming "cancerous" to increase and every time we do something right we further the ability of the cell to help out the tissue it belongs to which in turn helps out the organ and organs system until the organism, or universe in this case, is furthered.  Looking at ourselves as a small piece of the universe makes me feels small and slightly insignificant.  But realizing that my decisions effect the productivity and cohesiveness towards a common goal makes me also realize how significantly important it is that I make decisions that positively influence those around me and work towards some unknown common goal. 


Insignificantly Significant.  I would say that this discovery was pretty neat for a half an hour out under the stars without boots or gloves on a Sunday night.