One sprint around a few of the world’s cities gave me the vaguest impression that humans think very highly of their superiority.
Take New York, for example: The city is lined with shining buildings, entire boroughs are dedicated to the art of cuisine, and history is etched into every barren bone of the cosmopolis. Everything screams domination, and everything that might be remotely subpar of that standard still whispers fabled stories of a city that won’t stop glowing.
London, too. Superiority bleeds from the alleys of articulate regency, seeping like some forgotten plague into the fog, tomato-red buses, and vigor of the city that disregards any other soul or substance that isn’t human.
Cities are only one of the signs to the rest of the creatures and marvels that blatantly read, “Back off, we’re better.”
Because bigger is always better, apparently. Shiny is always good, too, and bonus points if something is constructed with brick or stones because it looks pretty while being formidable. And devastating.
And big.
New York City is no lighthearted joke: it’s feral, untamed, and rivals the most brutal phenomena of nature with its sheer size and locomotive force. London follows similarly, trodding behind in a slightly different accent and disposition with equal parts fog and fervor.
Chicago, Quito, Los Angeles, San Francisco—sprawling urban villages, mere pinpricks on a grassy horizon, cities within cities because one title isn’t enough to contain the blunt, towering ego of a fact: Humans are better, case closed.
Better than the creatures above, the ones that walk below. Better than the air and the breeze because people use it to their advantage anyway with windmills and turbines. Better than the sun with all the room that is built for shadows and far more superior than the fire or the sky because there are airplanes and chimneys.
It paints a picture of invincibility.
With all the magnitude or colossal swell to build and excel, I think the truth is buried somewhere far beneath the trenches of the cities and skyscrapers.
We’re small.
Shaking in the wind, houses uprooted by tornados, giant swells of salty ocean water sweeping through and decimating an entire big shiny city like a hit and run. Fires eat towns alive.
For me, it’s the seascapes and skylines that put my grand problems into perspective. With all the force of the world and the magnitude of what my problems mean on a larger scope, I can only conclude one thing:
Nothing matters.
Not really. I want things to matter because that is what life is all about—making purpose of the most subjective journey on the planet.
When I put my problems in terms of sea and sky, they shrink and crumble until they are worth nothing. They are so small that I begin to wonder when I started to put so much worth into my math grade or what one person is thinking about me during the smallest interaction.
And the things that seem even big to me right now—London and New York, college, and what is going to become of the next four years of my life—are also small. Microscopic, even if I were to zoom out to the galaxy and peer in on Earth through a microscope. New York would be little more than a speck on the globe, the tallest buildings no more than a bump in comparison to the rough, sweeping terrain that causes ripples and ridges across the planet.
Even from the top of the One World Trade Center, the tallest building in New York City, I watched the sunset crawl across the Brooklyn skyline, fusing together the Hudson River and the boats that huffed across the waves into one still, glowing portrait. A salty stretch of sea merged with the dissolving sky, a portrait to minimize troubles.
A reminder that even though I stood on top of the world, no problem would ever be truly justified with the vastness of both sea and sky.
