Why is the good stuff so far away? My friend Thomas went to visit his friend that lived out in the country. He was probably ten years old. His friend had a horse. Thomas and his friend rode horses. When their visit was over, Thomas had an exciting tale of riding a horse. He told how much fun he had and what happened. After all these years I don’t know if this was a tale about the true horse ride or was this a fabricated tale.
Thomas told about how much fun he had riding the horse by woods and across fields. Then he told about a campfire. I’m not sure whether he was actually at a campfire or this was just his imagination. He said what he would really like to do was ride a horse out west and sit by the campfire at night. He weaved a tale about that and I had clear images of him with a horse with saddlebags and bedroll and a coffee pot on a campfire. He was like Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger and Hop a long Cassidy all wrapped up in one. It never occurred to me how far out west would be. This all sounded like an excellent adventure. Forget about getting out west, we had much more pressing problems right here.
Thomas’s friend lived out in the country. That was five miles from Greeleyville. His dad drove him out to his friend’s house. It was too far for him to ride his bike and this newfound adventure might as well be somewhere out west. He couldn’t get there. He asked the philosophical question that has been bothering us since then. Why is the good stuff so far away?
That was his only trip out to see his friend with the horse. He never got to camp under the stars with the campfire and coffee pot. It wasn’t a year later that three of us were going to ride our bikes out in the country to visit a different friend. Our friend lived two and a half miles outside of town. He was out in the country and he rode the school bus to school everyday. One day we took off after school and headed out into the country. Riding the little 20-inch bikes tired us out and after an afternoon of playing baseball we rode back home. It seemed like we had ridden across the great plains of Eurasia with the silk traders. Again we were faced with the question of why is the good stuff so far away?
Time passed and our sphere of influence changed with cars and traveling. Of course, we found good stuff that was further away. As time keeps marching by, we found more good stuff and it seems to be further away.
Lately, I have been reading about the universe and the mind-blowing size of all the good stuff. Do you ever find out about something new and say to yourself, “If this is out here, think what else may be out here?” And then you think about how far some of this is away from where you are right now. What else could be out there? Who Knows? But just imagine, you are just one person out of 8 billion people that live on a planet of eight planets that circle a star, out of 300 billions stars in a galaxy out of 200 million to 2 trillion galaxies. That’s possibly over 93 billion light years across. No telling what could be possible. Maybe one day we could find out where the center of the universe could be. Then we could be sad to find out the center of the universe is not us.
