I was in Bulgaria recently on business. I was sitting in my hotel room working. Surely there is no better example of comfortable misery than when one is alone working in one's hotel room at midnight far from home. I needed a break.
I went downstairs to take a walk on the beach (I was staying on the Black Sea coast). Once my eyes had adapted to the dark I could begin to enjoy looking at the stars.
Far out to sea I noticed the flicker of distant oil platforms flaring off gas. I hadn't noticed these during the day, they were so far away. But at midnight a few could be seen flickering faintly on the horizon in a row.
I saw a planet hanging low in the sky. It was roughly the same brightness as the flares, although obviously much further away. I think it was Jupiter: 1,321 time larger than the Earth, its illumination so attenuated by distance that it was rivalled by a mere gas flare, like a candle held up to the Sun.
A star was next to the planet in the sky. It was very bright, one of the prominent low magnitude stars, and was similar to the planet and the flares in brightness, but again, another step further away on the distance ladder that rested on that beach in Bulgaria that night: more luminous, but further away.
But the most distant place in the universe that night was my home. As I looked at pictures of my family on my mobile phone, nothing was more luminous than my aching heart that night, and so nowhere felt further away.
That's really lovely. Our planet is so small, we are so tiny, but our hearts and souls are massive. It's a strange old world, and what's out there? Might it be a reflection, who knows.
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