Nothing can put your place in the world into perspective quite like looking at an aerial photo of your own house. Technology has marched to the point where, believe it or not, for almost any location on earth, you can find an aerial land photo which will wow you with its amazing level of detail. When I looked at aerial photos of my neighborhood, I was surprised, and I bet you will be too when you start to see them.



Looking at the aerial photos made me realize how much smaller the world has gotten since I was a kid. We did not have a computer when I was growing up, and even if we had, we would not have been able to use it way back then for such a superfluous activity. Now we can use Google map to get an aerial photo of any place in the world. And by "any", I seriously mean it. I swear, kids these days do not really appreciate how much better their lives are compared to our times.

Technically speaking, each aerial photo is totally sharp and picture perfect. I can even spot the tree where I used to swing when I small, and the ruins of the rotted out old sandbox. Do not laugh at me for getting a bit sentimental at a time like this, but honestly, it really brings life into perspective to see it there, so small, and obediently pasted up on your computer screen like that. When you start to look at an aerial photo of your own house, you will see just what I mean.

But I disagree in some respects. Back in those days, everything seemed so big. The trees in the yard ? the ones that are now barely a dot on the aerial photo that I have printed out and pasted on my wall ? were as magnificent and awesome as the formidable sky itself. I remember gazing out from the grass underneath the big old beech tree, and being literally swept away by the childish yet beautiful conviction that the top of it was up there in the sky.

Now, I can instantly conjure up an aerial photo of any place that I have never been, and this reminds me of my childhood too. We used to spend hours and hours lost in such wonderful games of imagination, pretending that we were rich Arabian princes, or brave medieval adventurers, or even cool secret agents from some James Bond movie. Looking at an aerial photo, I feel that way again but in a slightly different way, as the whole world appears to be just a click k away, sitting right at my fingertips whenever I order it to be there. It is almost like having superhero powers. I feel like master of the world.