My son was swinging in the backyard when he ponderously asked me, “If the planet is round, why does it look flat?”
I loved that he asked me this question. It gave me a chance to point out how miniscule we are in the universe. We think we matter so much, we feel huge on our planet, looking up at our big sky, and our world seems to be our size somehow. But we’re so small. I explained that it’s probably because we’re so tiny. Of all explanations and possible responses, he understood, and accepted that one.
Recently my daughter talked about how clever she was to have figured out the trick to tell left from right. You hold your two hands out in front of you and make an L with the index fingers and thumbs. Whichever hand is showing an L (in the right direction) is the left hand. Nice trick, right?
This discussion led to talk about how “left” and “right” are subjective. For one person, left is here, right is over there, and why question it? But for the person facing the opposite direction, the opposite is true. So it all depends on where you are standing. Concepts get mushy about which direction points you where. The same is true of cardinal directions, even when we most want to rely on them for something more long-lasting and empirical.
Typical for a discussion with an inquisitive and dogged-brained four-year-old, who asked me recently, “What happens to ‘north’ when you reach the north pole?”
Hm. Indeed, and what happens to east and west too? From there, if you travel in the directions you think of as east or west, you end up going south. Isn’t that a mind bender?
It’s just demarcations on a large sphere, and seemingly arbitrary. The planet rotates on an axis, but we think of it as side-to-side rather than up-and-down. We orbit around the sun in a side-to-side motion as well. Maybe the sun is jumping rope with the planets, and the orbit should really be conceived of as top-to-bottom.
At any rate, the planet being round, left eventually becomes right, and north eventually becomes south, and east eventually meets west. Depending on where you’re standing.