“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” – Carl Sagan
Howdy.
Welcome to this little island in the middle of the gigantic sea of interwebs. This is a place where all of my feelings and ideas hit the paper (it’s digital paper, but it still counts).
I’d call myself a nerd. A nerd with heart. I come from a background of IT, which started when I was working in libraries – the halls of the written word. I’ve always enjoyed writing and held a hope of writing professionally in the back of my mind for years. I simply never acted on it; never put my creativity out there for others to see.
This here is an attempt to do just that. To broadcast my perspectives, emotions, and thoughts that I know others have as well. Writing and poetry are open lanes between our common humanity, so my hope is that some of this will resonate with you as well.
The name of this little project – Overview Affected – has its roots in an experience called the “overview effect”. You can read more about it here, but it is essentially the shift in perspective that those who have ventured outside of our atmosphere report experiencing when they look back on our Earth from space. It’s a realization that things are much smaller and more connected than we acknowledge in our day to day lives on this planet. More than ever before, we everyday human beings have the opportunity to experience this feeling for ourselves. For example, visit this page and contemplate for a few moments. Did it affect you? It gets me every time. Hence, the second word in the title of this project: “affected”.
I hope you enjoy some of what you read here, and that some of it challenges you as well. Human life is a spiritual experience, even if there is no spirituality in this universe at all. You’ll find that expressed and appreciated here.
Highest regards,
OVERVIEW AFFECTED 