One 9-min video that will put everything into perspective

I want you to pause whatever you’re doing and watch this 9-minute film called Powers of Ten.

It’s from 1977, but it’s one of the most timeless videos I’ve seen in awhile.

In nine minutes you’ll zoom out from a picnic on Earth to the edge of the observable universe, then all the way back in, through skin and cells, into the atoms that make you.

I watched it at a workshop a few weeks back and it cracked something open for me.

A sort of paradoxical perspective that has lightened a cognitive load:

I am nothing. I am everything. I am a single cell of the universe, and the universe is a single cell of me.

It reminded me how tiny we are in the cosmic scale and how miraculous it is that we get to be here at all.

That we get to breathe, to make love, to create things, to feel.

That awareness itself might be the only point.

And yet, despite being made of exploding stars and quantum dust, floating around a spinning blue rock full of anxious apes, inside of a galaxy of endless mysteries that doesn’t even know we exit, we spend most of our lives trying to fix ourselves.

It’s hilarious when you think about it.

Here we are, little walking molecular meat puppets. Accidental masterpieces created out of billions of years of the universe just fucking around and finding out, yet we’re still so concerned that we haven’t quite “figured it out”.

As if there’s something to figure out when you’re already the whole damn thing.

That’s the joke we keep missing.

It’s like a wave trying to prove it belongs to the ocean.

We are the universe pretending to be human, pretending it needs to improve.

Perhaps the whole point isn’t to fix the self, but to remember that the self was never broken, just busy taking itself very, very seriously.

If you liked the film as much as I did, consider reflecting on these:

• What changes when you truly feel how small and tiny you really are in the grand scheme of the universe?

• If you are both everything and nothing, what becomes possible?

• What if consciousness isn’t inside you, but you are inside consciousness?

• What if every mistake was just the universe experimenting through you?

• Who would you be if you stopped narrating your life and just lived it?

• How would life change if you saw it all as one long cosmic joke that you’re in on?

• How would you live if you remembered that you are the universe looking back at itself?

And then go have some fucking fun!

You deserve it, you magnificent sentient sack of cosmic nonsense.

Happy Sunday, ya’ll!

🤙

Much Love,

Cory Firth
Creator of One Minute Weekend

Let’s work together!