Much of what the Teachers are encouraging us to do now involves making way for new perspectives, opening up to new possibilities.

We’ve all had moments where we realize something, and it changes us so much that we can never go back to our previous way of thinking. I had one of these moments lately, and it involved my way of thinking about air, of all things.

I was reading a brief article by Sarah Barmak. In her article she talks about the book An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere, by British science writer Gabrielle Walker.

Barmak says, “The next time you’re in Carnegie Hall and the air seems a little stuffy, don’t blame the upper crust in their box seats. Blame the building’s air. It weighs almost 32,000 kilograms…Though we take air pollution very seriously, we tend not to pay much attention to the air itself…”We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air, ” wrote mathematician Evangelista Torricelli, whose experiments discovered atmospheric pressure….In what way is the Earth’s air an “ocean”? It’s because it’s so big and heavy. It’s so heavy that it’s almost inconceivable that we walk around and brush it aside, but it’s actually weighing down on us. Just like an ocean, it’s also got currents that distribute warmth throughout the world, and it also has creatures moving through it. I had thought that we were living on the surface of a rocky planet. I had no idea I was living at the bottom of an ocean. “

I had never thought about that at all. Our atmosphere really is like an ocean. Think about it: rain, snow, fog, mist, clouds, rainbows, plain old humidity—they are all suspended water. They’re just in a looser arrangement than what we usually think of as an ocean.

Now think about what it’s like to be up in an airplane, above the clouds. Not far above those clouds is outer space. The clouds are the surface of our ocean of air. The Earth’s crust is the bottom of that ocean. We, and all of the plants and animals, are living in a continuous ocean of air. I had been totally unaware of this. Now that I am aware, I am thinking about it all of the time. It has changed my perspective.