Why the people who look at the Pillars of Creation and feel comforted are processing something most of us spend our lives avoiding

The first time you really look at the Pillars of Creation — not glance, but look — something happens in the body before the mind catches up. Your shoulders drop. Your breath lengthens. You are staring at columns of hydrogen and dust in the Eagle Nebula, structures so large that light itself takes years to cross one of them, and somehow what you feel is not terror but a strange, almost embarrassing relief.

This is the part nobody warns you about. Cosmic imagery is supposed to humble us, diminish us, make us feel like specks.