Just a Speck in Time

Another Lesson from Travel and History

Jun 26, 2026

What can we learn from travel?

Of course, diversity, a broader perspective, views of different: cultures, geographies, histories, foods, arts, languages, dances, religions, philosophies, architectures, the list goes on…

Travel is an amazing elixir. Enticing, adventurous… mind-altering… even addicting.

I wrote and recorded these words on my travel podcast, “e-travels with e. trules”, back in 2017, just before I retired from my job as theater professor at USC, a job that, in fact, afforded me big chunks of time… to travel.

The episode is called “Why Travel?, and I suspect that many of you may not have listened to it, or to my travel podcast at all. Perhaps, you missed this episode from China in 2007. If so, please have a listen.

Travel expands your consciousness, stretches your horizons, and disrupts your habitual behavior.

And now that I’m traveling again, this time non-stop since my separation and divorce in February 2025, I find that travel is teaching me again, not only about myself and my independence, but also about the nature of history itself, particularly about the place any person, country, culture, empire, or even civilization has in the overall “big picture” of things.

Travel opens your mind, refreshes your worldview, and hopefully even, cures your myopia.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. - Carl Sagan

I know I’ve written before that I have this lifelong fantasy: that if you give me any specific year in recorded history, say 1789, 50 BC, 1492, 331 BC… that I could tell you… exactly what was going on in the world… across all civilizations, East and West, empire to empire… across the fickle fate of human history.

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet realized my fantasy, nor… do I ever expect that I will. In fact, I’m sure of it.

This is a Roman aqueduct in Southern France, built sometime between Caesar’s invasion of “Gaul” around 50 BC and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and its retreat from Gaul in 455 AD. During that time, the Romans easily imposed their administrative, economic, artistic (especially their monumental architecture), and literary culture on the Gauls, as well as upon Britain, Spain, and most of what is now Western Europe.

To see Roman remains here in Southern France in 2026, some restored, others not, like these ancient aqueducts, along with stone churches from the 9th and 13th centuries, old roads and brick granaries, is a humbling historical and human education.

It makes me think of the so-called “evolutionary periods of history”: the Ice Age (2.4 million years ago and lasting until 11,500 years ago), the Stone Age (with the development of rudimentary stone tools like flint at the end of the Ice Age, including humans’ “first civilizations” in Sumeria/Mesopotamia, and in ancient India and China, about 4500 BC), the Bronze Age (3300–1200 BC in Europe, Egypt and the Middle East in which the stories of the Bible are placed, when a mixture of copper and tin, “bronze”, became the next step in human evolution), the Iron Age (around 1200 - 500 BC, considered the final age of the three tool-making divisions beginning with “prehistory”), followed by the Classical Age (550 BC to 500 AD, including the Greeks and Romans), the Middle Ages (476 AD - 1450 AD, ending with the birth of the Renaissance), Early Modern (1500-1800 AD), and concluding with the Modern and Contemporary eras.

Quite the span of pre-human and human history!

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. - Carl Sagan

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. - Carl Sagan

I even use YouTube to enhance my historical and personal perspective.

There’s a brilliant and succinct series on the history of cities, like the AI version of Cliff Notes, 24-36 minutes of the entire history of Paris, London, Rome etc.

Here’s the start of one on London:

Rewind 2000 years to the place that we call contemporary London. You find nothing but a marshland next to a tidal river, barely inhabited, strategically useless except to the Romans. What happened to this backwater? Between then and now? Answers: invasion, fire, plague, revolution, blitz. And… somehow, even better food over the millennium.

If you’re interested, take a look:

How does all this make me feel personally?

Small.

Insignificant.

Invisible.

All uncharacteristic things for a man with five planets in Leo, astrological sign of the sun, center of the universe, and of the lion, king of the jungle.

My friend, Ric Reaper, with whom I recently stayed in Manila for almost three months, is a naturally humble and modest man. He does not think of himself as the center of the universe, his or anyone else’s.

When he told me what words best characterize me, he said, “self-absorbed”.

Not in a bad way; it’s just how you are.

I couldn’t argue with him.

He has also said to me many times,

In a single generation or two, no one will ever remember that you and I ever existed. We will be completely forgotten.

I didn’t like the idea, but again, I couldn’t argue. Other than the names that go down in the history books and in the memories of our loved ones, we are all but insignificant grains of sand in the history of time.

And now that I’m retired, improvising my way around the entire planet in such a way that not a single person in the world knows where I am at any moment from day to day, I feel even more insignificant and more invisible than ever.

Not in a bad way.

It’s just that ambition, ownership, and accomplishment are so low on my list now, that I often wonder what all my ego-driven striving was all about. It now seems so unimportant.

“Peace” is much more important to me. Living in the moment. Putting my fingers on my chest, over my heart, breathing in, breathing out, and feeling connected to the whole universe. Past and present.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. - Carl Sagan

The diminishment of my ego is simply a gift that I’ve discovered under the Christmas tree of life. Being solo, but not alone, is living in a free state of mind. Being connected to my ex-wife and to my adopted son are also gifts, not only for holidays, but also for the daily 102 degree (40 degree C) scorching heat here in the south of France.

And… sitting here with a cool fan blowing over my right shoulder, with the constant green mountainside looking at me through the big bay window, it’s… the same.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. ― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Speck Trules

Eric Trules' Substack

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