How to Speak to a New Year Like This One

I receive a weekly online publication, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian (founded in 2006)

In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective:
A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/12/21/reflection/

   In 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 Spacecraft, was launched to photograph the planets of our outer solar system.  On board was also that Golden Record – a time-capsule of the human spirit encrypted in binary code on a twelve-inch gold-plated copper disc, the vision child of Carl Sagan.  Its stated objective was to convey our essence as a civilization to some other civilization who could (improably?) intercept and translate it.  But Popova notes, it’s unstated (and more important) objective, was to mirror what is best of humanity back to itself in the middle of the Cold War, at a time when we seemed to have forgotten who we are to each other and what it means to share this fragile, symphonic planet.

   When Voyager had taken it’s last photo – of Neptune – NASA commanded the cameras be shut off to conserve energy.  But Sagan, had another idea – and ultimately prevailed upon NASA to take one more photograph – to turn the cameras around and take one final photograph, of earth from so great a distance, and low resolution as to have no scientific value. So, on Valentine’s Day of 1990, the Voyager took took the now-iconic image of Earth known as

The “Pale Blue Dot”

— a grainy pixel, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” as Sagan so poetically put it when he immortalized the photograph in his beautiful “Pale Blue Dot” monologue from Cosmos — that great masterwork of perspective, a timeless reminder that “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was… 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” lived out their lives on this pale blue dot. And every political conflict, every war we’ve ever fought, we have waged over a fraction of this grainy pixel barely perceptible against the cosmic backdrop of endless lonesome space.1

“In the cosmic blink of our present existence, as we stand on this increasingly fragmented pixel, it is worth keeping the Voyager in mind as we find our capacity for perspective constricted by the stranglehold of our cultural moment…. I don’t think it is possible to contribute to the present moment in any meaningful way while being wholly engulfed by it. It is only by stepping out of it, by taking a telescopic perspective, that we can then dip back in and do the work which our time asks of us.2

When you can’t see the forest for the trees, it’s easy to destroy the forest. 3

Pay Attention

Footnotes

1 You can see the photograph in Popov’s article, which I’ve referenced above, – and from which I’ve copied extensively.  At first and second viewing, I couldn’t even see the “dot” it was so tiny and unremarkable.

2 Ibid    Emphasis my own.

3  WKM  One of the tools in the therapist’s bag of tricks, is to “stand back and take a larger look.

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