Dolphin’s Dock

Who else watched the Perseid meteor shower this weekend? I caught it on Saturday night though it was scheduled to peak Sunday after midnight (too late for me when I have to work the next day). Fairly decent show this year. For me it brought back childhood memories as I used to regularly watch them growing up, but hadn’t for quite awhile in more recent years. In addition to those memories, another thought occurred to me as I watched those lights streak across the sky.

The meteoroids that had become those meteors had been floating around space for at least 2000 years (probably much longer), yet apart from an astronomer or a geologist here and there, most of us are oblivious to their presence. Surely most of us are aware that there is debris floating through space, it’s just not something we think about. That is of course until the chance to watch this debris be vaporized in our Earth’s atmosphere comes around, then people turn out in droves. This probably makes sense in the case of a meteoroid. A meteoroid has minimal value to offer non-scientists. For the lay person, the only benefit we can get directly from the meteoroid in the sometimes brilliant and exciting light-show of the meteor which just happens to coincide with the meteoroid’s “death.”

Yet, there are too many other things in life that we find ourselves equally oblivious to, right up until the point where the thing vanishes from existence. It’s often only when we are watching a loved one pass, a dropped sentimental item shatter on the floor, a good friend move away, the government steal some precious freedom or the death of some other part of our lives, that we are actually able to see just how much value that object/person/relationship/idea contained. The problem with only recognizing the true value of something as it blinks from existence is that it’s generally too late at that point to pull from it the full value that you can then see so clearly.  To use the analogy of the meteor, all to often one is looking at one area of sky only to notice a meteor falling in some other area.  By the time you can turn your head, it’s gone and you were able to catch only a glimpse of the show.  If we could recognize the full value of the meteor on a given meteoroid, we might follow the path of that meteoroid (assuming we had the technology to easily track a single meteoroid accurately) while it is still just lump of rock and therefore know exactly where to be looking to see the full effect of the meteor.

I think it’s important to take the time every so often to examine that which is important to us and attempt to see and appreciate the true value in those things.   It’s a regrettable circumstance to only understand the potential of something in your life as you’re faced with the rapidly fading path it left as it streaked out of your life.