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The leaves have started to gather along the sides of my driveway, having fallen from the big trees that stand in line across the road from my house. I don't have an award-winning garden by any stretch of the imagination but I still like to keep it reasonably tidy. Leaves dropping means that they have to be gathered up and taken away otherwise they accumulate into a carpet that might be beautiful autumnal colours, but they soon get wet and eventually become a rotten mess that gets stuck in around the base of the hedge and amongst the other plants in the borders.

As I gathered up the first of these fallen leaves this past weekend I began to think about the whole natural cycle of life. I am indeed blessed to live in a beautiful Irish countryside, which changes its wonderful panorama with the passing seasons, to give me a brand new treat each and every day that I am lucky enough to be part of it.There are times as I walk in the nearby county roads that my naked eyesight allows me to survey many miles of this natural beauty.

As I awake each morning to the varying types of day, these natural wonders are set out before me and are, more often than not, overlooked as I get on with my daily chores. Yet it only took a momentary lapse into wonderment while lifting these dead leaves, for me to realise how insignificant my input into the world must be.

At my towering height of just over six feet those trees dwarf me. The branches of these big trees stretch out in every direction as they vie with each other for the sunlight and the roots must stretch towards all the compass points as they bury themselves into the earth in search of the moisture from the rainfall that gives them their growth. They might be oak or beech, however these trees although mighty in comparison to me, would be dwarfed by some of those amazing sequoia trees that I learned about in school which are the tallest in the world. I think they grow in America.

And there you have it! Trees are such amazing things that I have heard it said they are almost everlasting, in that they will continue to grow for years, maybe centuries.

I might think I'm a big fish in my pond, but compare my pond to the largest ocean, and then compare the size of that ocean to the hugeness of our planet. Then when I stand outside my house at night and wonder at the vastness of a sky filled with tiny stars which are everyone possibly of a size similar to earth, and obviously there is much more to that whole universe than my eyes could ever see, even with the assistance of the largest telescope known to man.

Wow!

It kind of puts a different slant on things; what was that thing that was causing me so much pressure at work? It isn't such a big deal when measured up with the amazing world I live in. Why do we mere mortals get ourselves so stressed with our daily lives?

Isn't this just a perfect case of reality sinking in? If we can just take a step back from the daily grind, even for a short time, we should be able to reflect a little on all the amazing things that are going on around us, and maybe, just maybe, we can begin to understand the real meaning of life.

Learn more about this author, Stephen Owens.
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