MIGHTY SMALL THINGS

A bumble bee, according to aeronautics, can’t fly due to their weaker wings. However, a bumble bee still flies with all the impossibility according to humans. It simply doesn’t listen to what human arguments say about flight.

Have you ever wondered the most important invention of modern times that was crucial for the survival of mankind? Why do we miss the obvious things for superficiality? Why perfection lies in small things? Let’s ponder.

If we have to talk about some of the most important inventions of all time, it would definitively be space shuttle, jet aircraft, computers and internets, etc. But what do you think about certain crucial inventions, very small in size that we tend to overlook their existence at all? Like nut bolt, black tape, adhesive, etc. Do you think Eiffel Tower would have been made if there were no nut bolt in existence? Do you think a space shuttle would have been possible without sealing thousands of electrical wirings with adhesive tapes? These are just a few examples to highlight what crucial roles small things play in the epoch we called modern time. Small is perfect and perfection lies in small things. Big things exist because small things exist. It’s not the huge steel rods that hold the Eiffel Tower together, but the thousands of nut bolts that do. As the great Lebanese poet, Khalil Gibran once wrote:

And stand together, yet not too near together,

For the pillars of the temple stand apart.

And oak tree and the cypress

Grow not in each other’s shadow.

What Gibran wanted to mean is that the ceiling of the temple is not held by the pillars but the emptiness in between them. What we see is not always obvious (although it’s tough for any hard boiled advocate of science to believe how the emptiness between the pillars could hold the ceiling of the temple!) There is always a hidden picture to a story. In love, some people don’t talk and discuss about the little things with their partner. This is a mistake because small issues create misunderstanding which snowballs later into an avalanche that kills many promising and precocious love stories. Ignoring small things is never supposed to be a wise decision.

Small is beautiful as well. Most often a little smile is enough to brighten up a dull day. A small flower sometimes kindles a romantic zeal in a soul. Looking at a small bumble bee is enough to motivate someone. A bumble bee, according to aeronautics, can’t fly due to their weaker wings. A bumble bee still flies with all the impossibility according to humans. It simply doesn’t listen to what human arguments say about flight.

Small is powerful as well. Ask a nuclear physicist and he will explain to you the unbelievable energy hidden in the nucleus of a uranium atom. Dig deeper and you will find that a much smaller nucleus of Hydrogen can emit an even greater amount of energy than the unbelievable energy hidden deep in a Uranium atom. This world, the billions of galaxies, the cosmic dust, the vast emptiness and the entire cosmos called the Universe was once hidden inside a small miniscule point somewhere deep in a timescale many billions of year ago. Then the Big Bang happened and we were born from a small beginning. The Universe traces its origin from an unbelievably small point.

So, coming back to the original question, what was the most crucial invention of the modern time that was detrimental to our existence – existence of the entire mankind? Still no guesses? Well, again, a very small thing – NPK fertilizers – which was crucial for the global green revolution. Without NPK fertilizers, it would have been impossible to produce the gigantic amount of crops to feed the seven plus billions of mankind. Yet NPK fertilizers never made into the list of the glamorous inventions that changed the world.

Like I mentioned; small is powerful, small is beautiful. Big things are just an aggregation of many small things.