Alleviate Angst with Amazeballs Awe
The Stoic View from Above and Here is Now
Four years ago I found a passion for photography, starting with aerials from drones (I didn’t acquire my first DSLR until a year later). I was thrilled by the integration of gadgetry, flight, freedom, imagery, the outdoors, automation, creativity, computing, editing, and even a bit of artificial intelligence. Most of all I was captivated by the pliability of perspective that came with relatively small changes in position, altitude and gimbal angle along with lighting over brief time periods.
Last fall I set out with my DJI Phantom 4 Pro to capture the downtown Denver, Colorado cityscape around the golden and blue hours of early evening to eliminate shadows, paint the sky, and lace the architecture with city lights. I wanted to capture all five of the tallest buildings, two of which are on the same block, so I started just west of there near Larimer Square. My first shot to the east, the above, came out quite well with the Four Seasons Hotel and 1144 Fifteenth (the Optiv building) prominent and some nice hues across the sky and buildings.
With this “bird’s eye” or high angle offset view you get a sense of depth and height that is impossible to achieve from the ground. Yet it’s a bit jumbled, the streets are obscured, and the rooftops at bottom right aren’t very attractive. The Daniels and Fisher clocktower and 1801 California buildings are partially blocked by Optiv. So I arced to the left to get a southeasterly view with a bit more of a down angle:
In this shot, the valley of shorter buildings between 15th Street and the 16th Street Mall is revealed, and we get a clearer picture of distances and orientation between buildings. The Optiv building in profile catches a reflection of the sunset and dining tables arrayed along Larimer street are visible at the bottom. Overall, the image is a bit more drab and the streets are mostly still hidden. I then backed out a bit and to the south, slightly lower, and yawed my view a bit north. With plenty of battery remaining, I waited ten minutes for the lights to come on:
Now I’ve blocked the Republic Plaza and Wells Fargo Center buildings in the background with the Optiv building retaining the reflection, but got the brightly illuminated undergirding of 14th, Larimer, and Market Streets in return. As light dwindles from the sky, it fills the windows and facades of the city with vibrant life and color.
When I’m flying I’m always a bit stupefied by the fluid evolution of the scene on my viewing device under but minor manipulation of the control sticks. It has the feel of a video game, but it’s entirely real. While also maintaining visual line of sight to the aircraft, I’m completely absorbed in the experience and thoroughly annoyed by curious questioning, or worse, confrontation from bystanders. The general public remains largely ambivalent about the presence of drones in the airspace, with legitimate concerns about privacy invaded by peeping tom missions or other nefarious uses.
In the hands of responsible pilot-photogs, the imagery produced is entirely in the other direction: toward the macro, the big picture where bigger details present themselves and individual persons shrink to insignificance. In this transcendent perspective, where all three dimensions of space are given equal weight, what emerges is patterns, context, connections, and depth.
After landing and packing up my gear, I always feel better than I had before, left with a sense of calm, catharsis and nourishment. The trivial troubles that were eating my lunch just don’t matter as much as I thought, and I’m instilled with humility and reverence. I can’t wait to get home to curate my raw files and start editing.
Having struggled with anxiety and addiction for many years, the therapeutic relief I got from drone photography as a creative outlet was welcome. I found it similar to yet different from more physically perilous and adrenaline flooding adventures such as sky and scuba diving.
I am reminded that I’m not at the center of the universe nor am I the first to be inspired and comforted this way. The ancient Stoics advocated a meditative exercise, accessible by anyone with an imagination, called the “View from Above,” to induce a transformation in our view of the world and our place upon it as a means to inner peace and freedom.
In these troubling times of social distancing and economic upheaval under the specter of death in isolation by a pandemic infection, we can all benefit from a stronger sense of connection and the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, to play the hands we’ve been dealt, and deal with life on life’s terms. The View from Above is both a useful coping mechanism for facing the reality of our existence and a great introduction to the mindset of Stoicism — a practical secular philosophy for living a contented life of honor and virtue.
The Basics
My introduction to Stoicism and the View from Above after experiencing much of it through drone flight was serendipitous. Only ten months ago did I begin to seriously address an evident gap in my mental well being highlighted by my recovery: my “faith,” “spirituality,” or “God of my understanding.”
In a recent article in The Atlantic, Arthur C. Brooks, professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, proffers empirical equations, based on a “vast amount of literature,” for managing our own happiness proactively:
1) Subjective Well Being = Genes + Circumstances + Habits2) Habits = Faith + Family + Friends + Work
Not surprisingly, he argues that we have no control over our genetic makeup and limited control over our circumstances (which we tend to adapt quickly to and are transient), but we completely determine our habits. This is a fundamental tenet of Stoicism as well: that we don’t control and cannot rely on external events, only ourselves and our responses. The last three elements of habits are fairly self-explanatory but the first, faith, is foundational.
The choice of the word “faith” is unfortunate for me as I generally frown at the idea of checking my brain at the door, but here faith is meant to be generic in representing any philosophical structure “through which you can ponder life’s deeper questions and transcend a focus on your narrow self-interest to serve others,” religious or secular. It is a scaffolding upon which you stand to make sense of the universe and your proper place in it and which therefore governs your behavior. Personally I was turned off to church doctrine and dogma years ago by Christian evangelists and have had my fill of seeing the effects of Islamic extremism, so I needed somewhere new to start.
I began with my root affliction of persistent anxiety. I needed healthy tools to chill out and steady my mind. Mindfulness and meditation seemed to be buzzwords of good press at the time so I started out with Dan Harris’ Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics — not because I was skeptical but because it was clearly oriented toward newbies. From there, I was led to the connection to Buddhism, and then from there to Stoicism — the combination of which has come to be the basis for my nascent “faith.”
Stoicism and Buddhism are remarkably similar philosophies that were created independently thousands of miles apart but proximate in time. Buddhism was founded in present-day Nepal around 500 BC and Stoicism began in Athens, Greece around 300 BC. They both advocate seeking happiness internally, so that the vicissitudes of life will not be our masters. Both systems are practical and therapeutic in emphasizing focus of attention on the present moment to improve our lives and become calmer and wiser.
Stoicism stresses the importance of living in accordance with nature and accepting all of the things that happen in life. It is founded upon the four cardinal virtues:
- Wisdom (prudence): The ability to discern the appropriate course of action through reason and understand the difference between good, bad, and indifferent things. The one true virtue.
- Courage (resilience): The ability to withstand adversity, discomfort, uncertainty, and intimidation. It is strength borne of the application of wisdom to fear.
- Justice (fairness). Moral rightfulness and kindness borne of the application of wisdom to relationships.
- Moderation (temperance). The practice of restraint, self-control, discretion, and emotional regulation achieved through the application of wisdom to desires.
In Stoicism, it is our interpretation of events that causes us to be happy or unhappy, not any intrinsic quality of the events. Outside events need not disturb us and even if they do, they will soon pass, just as our lives and this world will. As the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius once said: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” This perspective parallels closely with the principles of emptiness, equanimity, and impermanence in Buddhism.
To cultivate it, Marcus conceived the practice of viewing the world from above to place ourselves in a universal context. One person in a community, one community on earth, one planet in the solar system, and so on. It is a spiritual exercise in the sense that, as Pierre Hadot remarks in Philosophy as a Way of Life, “the individual raises himself up to life of objective spirit; that is to say, he re-places himself within the perspective of the Whole.”
Donald J. Robinson provides us with a guided meditation for this, here is the text and the audio. Obviously, I love visuals, so here’s a video at an altitude much higher than a drone that speaks for itself without narrative:
We see continents, cities, oceans, clouds, thunderstorms, auroras. That thin hazy line just above the curvature of the globe is the upper boundary of the atmosphere. In watching that, you see how we’re all related. That blue marble is alive and fragile, it is our home for the foreseeable future, our cosmopolis, our spaceship! We don’t belong to tribes, but the whole of humanity, and we’re all in this together. The separation and differences between us as individuals is an illusion.
In 1968, Apollo 8 became the first crewed spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit and the first to reach the Moon, orbit it, and return. Perhaps more important than going to the Moon, we as humankind reached a new level of self-awareness. On that mission we got our first view of the entire Earth hanging in space. In the outstanding short film Overview, Edgar Mitchell, lunar module pilot, summarizes his experience: “you see things as you see them with your eyes, but you experience them emotionally and viscerally, as with ecstasy, and with a sense of total unity and oneness.” To complete the perspective, I highly recommend Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech.
But to really blow your mind, put it all in the context and scale of the size and life of the universe…
Going Super Spatiotemporal
My cosmic address is Aurora, Colorado, United States, Earth, The Solar System, Orion Arm, The Milky Way, Local Group, Virgo Cluster, Virgo Super-Cluster, Universe. We all share the last eight dimensions. My life is but an imperceptible blip in the infinite expanse of time. So is yours. When we zoom out to the entire universe and incorporate all of time in the exercise (sometimes called Here is Now) our insignificance as individuals becomes brain boggling. Marcus Aurelius sums it up well in Meditations 5.23:
“Constantly reflect on how swiftly all that exists and is coming to be is swept past us and disappears from sight. For substance is like a river in perpetual flow, and its activities are ever changing, and its causes infinite in their variations, and hardly anything at all stands still; and ever at our side is the immeasurable span of the past and the yawning gulf of the future, into which all things vanish away. Then how is he not a fool who in the midst of all this is puffed up with pride, or tormented, or bewails his lot as though his troubles will endure for any great while?”
The following two epic videos by melodysheep are breathtaking, perhaps even mildly terrifying, and well worth the time (11 minutes for first, 29 for the second), but immediately following I’ll provide my synopsis within a half baked cosmological perspective of God.
It starts with a bang:
It ends in a whimper:
When God said “BANG” he created time and space, and just for kicks, to see what it would be like, he stepped into it. Those dimensions could not accommodate the wholeness of his love, so his physical presence manifested as a homogeneous and isotropic singularity of infinite density and temperature.
The illusion of separation was set into motion as the universe expanded, cooled, and began to aggregate through randomness and gravity, beginning with subatomic particles. As Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it “We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.” We are all made of stars, fragments of God, and in that sense we ARE God and the means by which he is experiencing his own creation.
As the universe devolves over infinite time, we are forced to ponder the most humbling lesson of entropy in five short words: we’re all going to die. When I say all, I mean ALL. Unless we find a way to create new universes, the human race will become extinct and go the way of everything else in existence.
- In 400 million years, the sun will begin to swell and fail.
- In 1 billion years all life on Earth will be gone.
- In 8 billion years the Earth will be destroyed when the sun explodes.
- In 1 trillion years all the stars will begin to die off one by one.
- In 100 trillion years the universe will become a dark and degenerate boneyard of barely luminous white dwarves and black holes.
At that point time will have only begun to tick. Stray matter will gradually decay as atoms fall apart and protons disintegrate while black holes will become ever monstrous as they merge. Eventually, after unfathomable eons, the black holes themselves will disintegrate and there will be no matter left in the universe.
The void cools to absolute zero, permanent and unchanging. “Nothing happens, and it keeps happening forever” — time itself becomes meaningless. God’s ride will have come to an end, and his reintegration in the infinite will be complete.
Takeaway
What’s the upshot of all this? Shouldn’t it make us feel despair at the hopelessness of life? Why does anything matter at all? If we adopt the viewpoint of eternity, we could see beauty in the impermanence of everything. To me, there are three key lessons:
- We are connected. Again, we’re all cut from the same genetic cloth, the stuff of stardust, fragments of God, sharing the same ultimate destiny.
- We are mortal. Pondering your own death now and then is valuable. Are you moving toward a positive or negative answer to the question: “How did my life turn out?” When you’re on your death bed, you won’t care about possessions and wealth, you’ll care about people and relationships. You won’t care about risks and discomfort, you’ll care about experiences and accomplishments. You won’t care about society or what other people think about you, you’ll care about your legacy in your own eyes. You won’t care about your career, you’ll care about your purpose and your vocation.
- Randomness and entropy rule. The fate of the universe is the degradation of all matter and energy in it to an ultimate state of inert uniformity (i.e., nothing). A great deal of existence cannot be explained and the only rational and honest observation we can make about the universe is that it’s meaningless. Trying to find rational explanations for our existence in an irrational and indifferent universe is absurd. We can react to it in two ways — live it, or escape from it.
In the absence of universal values, transcendent morals, or a divine plan, we are freed from the bonds of hope and the illusions of meaning. We can live life in rebellion, in the present, without appeal, according to the meaning that we give it without want for anything more from a conceptual future. We can experience our existence fully, in the now.
We can choose to lighten up, love one another, get out of our heads, and get on with our lives. We can stop coming apart at the seams for the most inconsequential petty moments. We can stop focusing on polarizing divisions and start adopting more integrative, sustainable, and accepting perspectives.
So what are you waiting for? Live! There is so much you are capable of. One more quote from Marcus: “It’s time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.”
What’s the purpose of life? To give life to God. Don’t deprive him. Time’s ticking, you have nothing better to do, and you have literally NOTHING to fear.
