Quotes to Live By - When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to mean very much, do they?

Quotes to Live By - When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to mean very much, do they?

"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
-Virginia Woolf
Sometimes I need to take a step back out of my day to day life and reground myself.  To be very purposeful in my thoughts and think about perspective and what really matters in my life.  What is worth stressing over, and what I should really let go.  I picked this quote this week because I thought it was such a beautiful example of how small we are in the universe, and how some of the things we stress out about on the daily really are so insignificant in comparison.
This quote reminded me of a section in a book I read, The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer.  He writes:

“Walk outside on a clear night and just look up into the sky.

You are sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Though you can only see a few thousand stars, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone.

In fact, it is estimated that there are over a trillion stars in the Spiral Galaxy. And that galaxy would look like one star to us, if we could even see it.

You’re just standing on one little ball of dirt and spinning around one of the stars."

He goes on to say from that perspective do you really care what kind of car you drive, what brand of clothes you wear.  Do you really need to stress out over forgetting someone's name, or feel embarrassed about something you said last week to your colleague (that they probably didn't even remember anyway)?

Really, when we think about it, these things just don't matter enough to stress over.  I'm not sure about you, but reading something like this makes me take a step back and look at my life and what I place value on.  It helps me to realign what really is important to me.  After all, we get this one life and it goes by really, really fast.  We all get caught up in the stresses of material things, or our job, etc.  But I think if we can take a moment and refocus, we will feel a little more grounded and less stressed about these small things when we put it into perspective.  We all need this perspective more often.  

So next time your outside at night and take a look up at the stars, remember not to stress on the small things and instead focus on what really matters to you in your life.

Leave a comment