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It’s a term we use a lot at work, a favorite of my boss – summarizing the tendency for the scope of things like meetings, projects or work assignments to “creep” out of their boundaries and become unmanageable. But reading Mike Johnston’s latest sunday sermon over at The Online Photographer made me think of it in a different light.

Mike’s essay on “The Proximity Effect” postulates that each of our human experiences is limited to that which we see around us – or Own Little World as defined by our present surroundings – and that the rest of the universe falls into obscurity and relative smallness as we reach the limits of our tiny brains’ capacities for comprehension.

No offense to Mike, but I typically enjoy a markedly different experience…

Mike’s “sermon” spends quite a bit of time discussing his shower – I’ll spare you the details here since you can easily go and read them yourself – and discussing how the space of his shower becomes larger (to him at least) than anything else while he’s there.

Sometimes, this is how my mind works in the shower too. Other times, blinking away sleep and trying to pull my brain’s landing gear off the runway, the size of my human experience shrinks to the scope of my futile attempts to get the shampoo bottle open without bending back my thumbnail like an umbrella going inside-out. But other times, something magical happens.

The “scope” of my experience will start to grow… “scope creep”, so to speak. I start to think about the world outside my shower that is functioning perfectly in order to bring me a warm, comforting experience. My brain wanders down the water pipes to my hot water heater, and then out to the water main (that burst a couple weeks ago, prompting a traffic diversion on our street). My mind’s eye flies over the county Google Earth style, dipping down at the two reservoirs within bicycling distance. I think about the times Kelly and I have visited the pumphouse at Highland Park, and then zoom back a decade and a half to when my friend Mike Vollmer and I hiked and fished at Hemlock Lake (one of the main sources for our area’s public water).

Right about then, I realize that I’m spending way too much time in the shower and I better finish shaving before I end up late for work!

The first thing I thought of when I read Mike’s sermon this week was the way I feel when I stand next to the ocean. The vastness of the thing that’s lapping at your feet makes you realize just how small your little personal sphere is – yet the vastness of that thing is dwarfed by the universe Mike describes at the very moment you’re feeling dwarfed by something so tiny. Maybe you’re aware of it and maybe you aren’t, but he’s got a point when it comes to the unimaginable hugeness that forever lies just outside the boundaries of our comprehension.

Meanwhile, I’m thinkin’ I should get back to enjoying the smallness of our Jaccuzzi now. I wouldn’t want the relative insignificance of my little blog on this big giant Internet to start discouraging me!