smallpeople.

People are really small.

I had lecture this morning in Con Hall today, meaning that my class had about 1,400 people in it... give or take.

Unfortunately for me, like always, the lecture wasn't heading in a particularly interesting direction (we were learning how to cooperate as a team, or something along those lines. I'd almost rather do real work than have to learn about team work.). Furthermore, it was progressing pretty slowly. I looked at the projector screen maybe once every two minutes, and i still didn't miss any of the content.

This all lead to me being quite bored. So i amused myself.

I've always had a fascination with people's little physical habits. When i'm at wrestling practice teaching a move, at church serving on altar, or counselling a summer kid's camp, i always catch myself staring at the crowd of people and just taking in the crowd as a whole.

I don't really know how to explain it, but when you look at something, you're really only percieving that one thing, and everything else that you see, even though you see it, it's all just background. Because you're focused on that one thing.

In Con Hall today, i was sitting in one of the upper levels, and so with all the hundreds of people below me, i stared, unfocused, and there was a perpetual sea of movement.

At any given time while i was amusing myself with this, at least twenty people of the hundreds would be moving. Whether it was them raising their head, craning their neck, playing with their hair or nodding off to sleep, there was never a second of break in the constant movement.

And i kind of had a personal poetic moment. If I were to be staring at one person during this time, most of the time, they're actually not moving. But because i was looking at this huge crowd, of hundreds of people, there was always activity.

It was like hundreds of ripples on a small pond. Very cool.

There are so many people out there. And i still don't think i can even accurately percieve just how many people there are, and how small i am in the world. In my class of one hundred people, i feel small and unnoticed by the prof as i discreetly nibble away at my sandwich. In my larger class of 1,400 people, i can sleep in a contorted position and drool puddles and no one would say a word. All of these 1,400 people belong to the engineering department of U of T, and there are still another 600 or more engineers in the faculty, meaning there's over 2,000 of us. That's just the engineering faculty. In first year at U of T, accross all the disciplines, i bet there's at least 5,000 students. Multiply that out by four years, and you have 20,000. Consider that there are many more students in the university for post-grad degrees and you have even more. And then there's maybe 10 other major universities in ontario, plus colleges. And then accross Canada, North America, the Western Hemisphere, the World. The numbers are already beyond me, and i'm only talking about university students here.

As of september 23rd the world's population has hit 6.786 billion people. In my head, that number doesn't translate into an actual perception of how many people that is. I just know it's a hell of a lot.

All of a sudden, i don't feel like such a hot shot any more. I don't feel like i'm the center of the world like i admittedly do sometimes. But i'm not trying to be depressing.

It humbles me, but i like it.

Summary/Realisation: I'm really freakin' small.