To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. Carl SaganI don't have to look very far to find something that reminds me how small we are in the scale of things. I think that dwelling on such things was one way I kept myself in a perpetual state of melancholy. That was my desire when I was a teen. I loved to marinate in misery. It let me keep some of my impulses to laughter or merriment in check. I smile even now about those days. My hero was "Mr. Spock". I strove to be a distant, controlled being like him. With it I was fooling myself about how well I was handling all the grief and pain that comes with growing up. Also, it affirmed my own feelings of worthlessness. I had a poor self image in many ways and deluded myself about my strengths. It is miserable being a kid. Now I don't see my insignificance as a problem. It is actually comforting. It tells me not to expect too much of myself. It tells me to pay attention to life and all its details because of its rarity. And my lifetime, in the scale of the cosmos, is an extremely short lived event.