Also Worth Some Ink

Is the Sun jealous of Aldebaran

Astronomy tells us that the Sun is three hundred thirty thousand times more massive than Earth. We can see pictures of this in books — “artist’s conceptions” — but otherwise it is too vast an image for the human mind to fully grasp.

But there is a giant star named Aldebaran, which is more than forty-five times bigger than the Sun! Again, we can see artist’s conceptions in books, brought down to a scale that we can comprehend. Wikipedia tells us that if the Sun was the size of a basketball, Aldebaran would be the size of a school bus.

My question is, “If you were the Sun — the god Sol — would you be jealous because you were smaller than Aldebaran?”

I welcome new writers to this platform. I do not degrade them for having few followers, because I started the same way. Today, after writing here for four years, I have accumulated almost two and a half thousand. But Robert Roy Britt, after writing for seven years, has two hundred forty-nine thousand followers — a hundred and ten thousand more than Deepak Chopra!

Not, of course, that any of us compare ourselves to other writers. Why would we do that? It would be like the Sun comparing itself to Aldebaran. Crazy.

If you were a flea, would you feel you had any less right to life than the elephant you were — probably unknowingly — standing on? Or a who in Whoville, if that elephant were named Horton?

(You see, other writers have considered these questions, too. I am not the first.)

A person’s a person, no matter how small. — Dr. Seuss

A writer’s a writer, no matter how tall. — Ted Czukor