Thinking Holistically, but, on a Whole New Level

The following is one of the more inspiring passages that I have come across in years. I always wonder what our conflicts would look like if we had all of our peace talks sitting in Mr. Schwickart’s spot.

“Up there you go around every hour and a half, time after time after time. You wake up usually in the mornings. And just the way that the track of your orbits go, you wake up over the Mideast, over North Africa. As you eat breakfast you look out the window as you’re going past and there’s the Mediterranean area, and Greece, and Rome and North Africa, and the Sinai, the whole area. And you realize in one glance that what you’re seeing is what was the whole history of man for years — the cradle of civilization. And you think of all the history you can imagine looking at that scene.

“And you go around down across North Africa and out over the Indian Ocean, and look up at that great sub-continent of India pointed down toward you as you go past it. And Ceylon off to the side, Burma, Southeast Asia, out over the Philippines, and up across that monstrous Pacific Ocean, vast body of water — you’ve never realized how big that is before. And you finally come up across the coast of California and look for those friendly things: Los Angeles, and Phoenix, and on across El Paso and there’s Houston, there’s home, and you look and sure enough there’s the Astrodome. And you identify with that, you know — it’s attachment.

And down across New Orleans and then looking down to the south and there’s the whole peninsula of Florida laid out. And all the hundreds of hours you spent flying across that route, down in the atmosphere, all that is friendly again. And you go out across the Atlantic Ocean and back across Africa.

And that identity with Los Angeles and Phoenix and New Orleans and everything. And the next thing you recognize in yourself, is you’re identifying with North Africa. You look forward to that, you anticipate it. And there it is. That whole process begins to shift what it is you identify with. When you go around it in an hour and a half you begin to recognize that your identity is with the whole thing. And that makes a change.

You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you crossed again and again and again. And you don’t even see ‘em. At that wake up scene — the Mideast — you know there are hundreds of people killing each other over some imaginary line that you can’t see. From where you see it, the thing is a whole, and its so beautiful. And you wish you could take one from each side in hand and say, “Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What’s important?”

And so a little later on, your friend, again those same neighbors, the person next to you goes to the moon. And now he looks back and sees the Earth not as something big where he can see the beautiful details, but he sees the Earth as a small thing out there. And now that contrast between the bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament and that black sky, that infinite universe, really comes through.

The size of it, the significance of it — it becomes both things, it becomes so small and so fragile, and such a precious little spot in the universe, that you can block it out with your thumb, and you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing is everything that means anything to you. All of history and music, and poetry and art and war and death and birth out there that you can cover with your thumb.

And you realize that that perspective… that you’ve changed, that there’s something new there. That relationship is no longer what it was. And then you look back on the time when you were outside on the EVA [extravehicular activity] and those few moments that you had the time because the camera malfunctioned, that you had the time to think about what was happening. And you recall staring out there at the spectacle that went before your eyes. Because now you’re no longer inside something with a window looking out at the picture, but now you’re out there and what you’ve got around your head is a goldfish bowl and there are no boundaries. There are no frames, there are no boundaries.”

- Rusty Schwickart. Shared from The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge.