Zooming Out

This has been a busy week for me as I prepare to teach a law school course for the first time, among other new challenges I’ve taken on, so please forgive me if this week’s newsletter is a little shorter and less polished than usual.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the topic of how we see. I don’t mean just seeing what is visible to our eyes, but more importantly, seeing with our minds and our hearts. Where I’ve landed is the concept, taken from the worlds of photography and computer graphics, of zooming out and zooming in. Today I’ll focus (no pun intended) on zooming out.

Each of us who is blessed with eyesight is used to seeing our visible surroundings and the objects and creatures they contain. That’s what we usually think of as seeing, although some of us are better at it than others. Take me for instance. It’s not uncommon for me to notice a wall hanging for the first time a year after it was hung (something that just happened to me the other day). I live in my head so much that everyday objects placed in my field of vision can escape unnoticed for long periods of time. Would that it were not so.

But sometimes, to really see, we need to close our eyes. Years ago, when I felt stressed, I taught myself to close my eyes and gradually zoom out of the small space I occupy. I would first picture the room I was sitting in. Next, I would picture my house from a perspective above my roof and looking down. (Picture a drone with a camera hovering over your house.) Then I would go a bit higher and picture the rooftops of my entire neighborhood, followed by my entire town. After that, I would soar even higher and envision a larger region, and keep ascending higher until I could picture the planet Earth. From there, of course, the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe. The result of this process would be to visualize in my clumsy way just how small and insignificant I am in the great sea of existence.

I could achieve the same result by imagining people. How often have I found myself in a crowded airport, surrounded by thousands of people going to thousands of destinations, each with their own lives, family, and friends? I would never know these people, and they would never know me. For all practical purposes, I don’t exist to them, and they don’t exist to me. And that is just a single airport among all the places to go to in that city, and all the cities to go to in that state, and all the states to go to in that country, and all the countries to go to in our world. Each of us fills a tiny, tiny piece of real estate, and each of us could disappear with very few noticing.

So far, I’ve only been talking about space, but the same is true of time. Scientists believe that the Earth has existed for 4.54 billion years. Of that period, they say that human beings have been on Earth for 300,000 years. If I’ve done my math correctly (feel free to correct me), that means that humans have occupied the planet for .0066% of the planet’s history, and that I’ve been around for only about .02% of the history of our species. Not only will I never know the vast, vast majority of people alive today, but I’ll never know the vast, vast, vast majority of people who came before, not to mention those who will come later. And by the way, Earth is hardly the oldest rock in our galaxy, and our galaxy is not the oldest galaxy in the universe.

I recently saw a post on FaceBook that showed images of Earth, other planets, the sun, other stars and other galaxies (the latter taken from the Hubble Telescope). According to that post, there are thousands (I think probably at least tens of thousands) of galaxies, each containing up to a trillion stars, many of which likely have planets. Whoever posted those images did what I have been doing, only with real images, starting with Earth and gradually zooming out to demonstrate just how small our little planet is when compared to the vastness of space. We are nothing more than a teeny, tiny speck in the cosmos, most likely invisible to any inhabitants of other planets who are able to see beyond their own surroundings. That’s one of the things you discover when you start zooming out.

Now, I wouldn’t recommend dwelling on this for too long. After all, focusing on our relative insignificance in light of the vastness of time and space can be a little disconcerting, even depressing to some. It is a lot for our little minds to take in. And I don’t mean to suggest that we don’t matter. I happen to think we do, each and every one of us.

But zooming out also can be liberating. Realizing just how small we are in the vastness of creation is humbling, and God knows the world can use a little more humility, and a little less self-absorption, these days. The zoomed-out perspective also can take a lot of pressure off. When considered in the context of the entire cosmos, or even just in the context of our entire planet, our individual problems just don’t seem all that big a deal. As Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart’s character) said to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) in Casablanca, “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Our problems, however grave they may seem in the moment, really don’t amount to a hill of beans in the totality of space and time.

So, when our problems are keeping us awake at night, we might try to put them in perspective. Yes, our problems and responsibilities may be real and, at some level, really do matter. But at the same time, they are small in the greater scheme of things. Maybe we can learn to let them go, or at least to appreciate the little bit of time we have and the little bit of space we occupy and do a better job of enjoying the here and now.

I’ve been thinking of writing about this for a few weeks now, and sadly, now that I’ve finally gotten to it, I don’t have time to do the topic justice. But coincidentally, this morning I listened to an excellent episode of the “On Being” podcast in which the host, Krista Tippett, interviewed a writer named Oliver Burkeman about his new book called “Time Management for Mortals.” During the interview, she read the following passage from his book, which captures what I’m trying to say better than I have done:

No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance. It’s the feeling of realizing that you’d been holding yourself all this time to standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. And this realization isn’t merely calming, but liberating, because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a life well spent, you’re free to consider the possibility that many more things than you’d previously imagined might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You’re freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful than you’d supposed and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them on the grounds that they weren’t ‘significant’ enough. From this new perspective, it becomes possible to see that preparing nutritious meals for your children might matter as much as anything could ever matter, even if you won’t be winning any cooking awards, or that your novel’s worth writing if it moves or entertains a handful of your contemporaries, even though you know you’re no Tolstoy, or that virtually any career might be a worthwhile way to spend a working life, if it makes things slightly better for those it serves.

I can’t begin to tell you how refreshing I found this passage (and the entire podcast). It confirms what I’ve been mulling over a good bit lately - that it’s okay not to have achieved all of your life or professional goals or aspirations, because achieving them is not going to make much of a difference when all is said and done. And while it can be important to support the causes that are designed to make the world a better place, it’s also worthwhile to focus on the little ways we can make a positive difference in the lives of the few people whose paths we’ll cross in the short time that we’ve been given. And, recognizing the minuscule place we occupy in the grand sweep of space and time, to do what we can to simply appreciate and enjoy the ride.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Next up (when I get around to it): Zooming In. Have a great week my friends.