Bigger Perspectives = More Joy
This is the first of eight articles on Living Joyfully while the Environment Collapses written for those who seek to integrate environmentalism and spirituality.
You might want to expand that picture to see the Pale Blue Dot that is about half way up, and two thirds to the right, in that sunbeam. Less than 1 pixel in the original that was taken on February 14 (Valentine’s Day) in 1990. The camera was on Voyager 1, and taken from a distance of about 3.7 billion miles. That dot is us.
The first Pillar of Joy is about Enlarging Our Perspective.
In THE BOOK OF JOY, Bishop Desmond Tutu and His Holiness the Dalai Lama identify the 8 Pillars of Joy, and the first is exactly this: Enlarge your Perspective.
James Baldwin wrote: The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change the world.
The Dalai Lama said: For every event in life there are many different angles. When you look at the same event from a wider perspective, your sense of worry and anxiety reduces, and you have greater joy… So therefore, if you look from one angle, you feel, Oh, how bad, how sad. But if you look from another angle at the same tragedy, the same event, you see that it gives me new opportunities.
Now, hear Bishop Tutu: We must look at any given situation or problem from the front and from the back, from the sides, and from the top and the bottom, so from at least six different angles. This allows us to take a more complete and holistic view of reality, and if we do, our response will be more constructive.
Change your perspective by one millimeter, or less than 1 pixel, and you can change the way you see the world, even when our environment is collapsing.
Consider that Pale Blue Dot for a moment, or longer. It was Carl Sagan, the American astronomer, who wrote a powerful description of the Pale Blue Dot.
Carl Sagan’s unforgettable perspective.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, 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, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
THE BIG POINT
As the Dalai Lama and Bishop Tutu say in THE BOOK OF JOY, the narrower one’s perspective, the more self-preoccupied we are. With that, there are fewer options for how to think, feel, and act. The possibilities diminish. Our creativity shrinks. Our joy contracts.
As we narrow our perspective we are more likely to get stuck.
However, we can jump to more Joy by taking a bigger perspective.
There is way, way more going on than your life or mine — and we are better off when we remember the enormous grace in which we all live and move and have our being.
Reframe the junk that has you stuck by taking a bigger perspective. Yes, Mother Earth is here — our home. Yes, she is collapsing.
Yet, this is still but one Pale Blue Dot in an incomprehensible sea of mysterious beauty.
The story of your life, and of Life Itself isn’t done. Not nearly done.
In 2020, I wrote the book LOVING MOTHER EARTH: Integrating Environmentalism and Spirituality. You can find commentaries about the big ideas in this little book at www.loving-mother-earth.com, and here on Medium. You can purchase my book on Amazon, and know that if you do, $5.00 from every purchase is donated to The Sierra Club.
The cover of my little book of big ideas.
Thank you for Loving Mother Earth. Follow me and I will follow you if, in truth, you are passionate about integrating environmentalism with spirituality. After all, we are in this together.
