Not so small world

When I was a child the world was big. I mean really big. So big it took me ten minutes to walk into town. The road swept gently upward as it went one mile into town. A mile was huge. But the neighbor and I made that trip many times. The world was huge, it took us a bit over ten minutes to DRIVE to church. Even farther away was the mall. It took us a whopping 45 minutes to get to there.

The halls of my school were massive corridors that were the arteries of the school. Students flowed like blood back and forth at certain times of the day. Try as we might, we could not even jump high enough to touch the ceilings. It took minutes to walk all the way from one end to the other so we could go outside and play. Then high school came and again we were dwarfed by the size. Ceilings were higher, our lockers were split, the tall upright area for you coat and stuff, and the wider top part for books, the top part was out of reach of many of us. But we slowly, year after year grew into the lockers. Soon the classrooms seemed smaller, the halls more crowded, then came graduation.

Suddenly we found the world bigger still but it got quickly smaller. As we got our licenses the mall didn't see the so far when we drove ourselves. Then colleges hours away and we drove into the bigger world. But even hours into a drive, something felt like it was shrinking. I remember when cell phones were rare. But as they got more and more popular, the distance between friends got smaller. Soon we had friends across the world, thanks to the Internet. Now i just feel the world has lost its bigness.

It sorta makes me sad that the world that once seemed so huge and amazing, now feels so small and... lame. I hate the fact that I had to grow up and am now part of the world. There are way to many things that  happen on the other side of the world, that are effecting my life, and the lives of everyone I know, and we have no say in it. Toxic waste being dumped into the ocean because of a nuclear problem. Putting chemicals into our foods and drinks that is known to cause cancer, make people fatter, and dumb us down. But this post isn't about those things. It is about how small the world is now.

The Phoenix from Star Trek: First Contact. Doesn't seem to hard to make.

I guess whoever wrote "It's a Small World After All" really knew a thing or two about life. I really do hope mankind manages actual space travel soon, I want to feel the wonder of how big everything is again. I want to be a kid and complain that something is ten minutes away. I would really love to complain that something is 10 light-years away. Come on Zefram Cochrane, make a warp engine already. Let's get us to the stars. Let's feel so small again, let's be small kids in a giant galactic playground.