The Significance of Insignificance

There is a wide variety of flavors of people you can sit next to on a plane. You could get a crying baby. A Chatty Kathy. A Grumpy Gus. The sickness vector. Or the “reheated Filet O Fish” sandwich person, who may be the worst of all.

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Or you could end up with someone who talks your ear off about all things life for the 90 minutes from Harrisburg, PA to Atlanta, Georgia. And, if you may guess, this was the person I sat next to back in May on a trip home from a speaking engagement.

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It started with a simple question about the CGM she was wearing, and from there…we were off! Not just the aircraft, but our conversation. Heyo!?

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She was a curious person, and I appreciate that since most people aren’t. She asked about my kids, and my upcoming kid, and shared her story of raising her own from a much younger age than my wife and I are. It turns out she has three boats, but none of them work, which is a good lesson in avoiding purchasing watercraft lest you simply throw money into the ocean.?

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But we eventually got into the significance, and then the insignificance of life. How often we get caught up in petty arguments and dumb drama when ultimately, as we settled on, we are all just stardust that in the backdrop of the billions of years of the history of the galaxy, don’t really matter. All of the drama and problems we think of as the worst thing in the world, when zoomed out in the course of history, or in our case discussing at 36,000 feet, don’t really matter much.

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It is rare to find such enlightenment from a stranger on an airplane. Unless of course the smell of cold McDonald’s helps you find a higher plane on an airplane. While I had hoped to read or bury my ears in a podcast, this was a much more enjoyable conversation. It helped make a late departure and a tight connection on Atlanta fade away, as most problems should in the backdrop of our long history, and that everything we hold near and dear was, and and will eventually be, just stardust again.

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Eventually, as many conversations these day go, she moved the topic to what has been on many people's mind in the last several years:

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“What are your thoughts on COVID?”

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I simply responded with a smile:

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“I need to go to the bathroom now.”

Some insignificant Stardust isn’t worth ruining a good conversion.

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