Once our basic needs for life and shelter are met, much of our psychological suffering is a problem of self-reflection – accepting the breadth of reality within your own context and using that to explain, often painfully, the actions and motives of others, the course and cause of events. As this pit of rumination sinks deeper and deeper into the inner world, the outer world – the world of clouds and crocodiles and flickering spring light – recedes further and further beyond the horizon of our consciousness, separating us from all that is good and true and full of wonder. Despair is nothing more than the pinching of a hole, it reduces the great vista of reality to a certain definition of a certain moment.
The more we free ourselves by widening the hole to let the world in, the more we suffer. That is why seeing with the eyes of the astronauts can be the greatest power, the most beneficial lens-refining, because the astronauts alone can widen the space wide enough to see the whole world, rise and set against the laziness of time as dark as a single blue marble, all our sorrows and worries swirling around as far away as the Cambrian.
While orbiting the war-torn world aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Chris Hadfield took questions from Earthlings via a Reddit AMA. Asked for her advice to anyone on the verge of giving up and her way through those times of greatest despair, she offers:
I remind myself that each sunrise is the harbinger of another opportunity, and I take a quiet, anonymous pride in the accomplishments I make each day. Every evening my target list is not completed, but I celebrate what I have done, and I resolve to do better tomorrow. Also, nothing is as good or bad as it seems at first. Stay tuned – of course yours a life to talk about, learn from, live and love.
This natural progression – the fact that this world is endless and our story is not written – is nowhere more visible, the persistence of infinite life itself is nowhere more understandable, than when it is seen on the scale of the entire planet. Hadfield captures this basic observational equation:
It is endlessly surprising how beautiful our changing, ancient, beautiful world is. All my 1,650 routes, I saw something new. And I was up long enough to watch the end of the seasons on earth, like Mother Earth taking one breath out of 4.5 billion souls.
A single scream of basic beauty is enough to revive the spent lungs of life, undermining the narrative of despair. “They should have sent a poet,” gasps Jodie Foster's astronaut character in the film based on Carl Sagan's novel. Contact personand it is with the poet's understanding that Hadfield describes such an antidote to despair—the Bahamas, seen from space in all its “great visible invasion of coral reefs and shallows, pierced by the deep tongue of the sea which gives it a butterfly-like glow to all the green that exists.”
Before we left Earth for the farthest reaches of the cosmic unknown, those last unknown frontiers of the unknown were the extremes of the Earth itself – the poles. International explorers were the astronauts of the nineteenth century.
Many die knowing the unknown.
Many sink into “soul-despairing depression” during the six-month polar night, as dark and endless as spacetime.
Again and again, they were saved by surprise.
In the first year of the twentieth century – that period between the years of environmental exploration and the years of space exploration – the twenty-nine-year-old Danish artist Harald Moltke was invited to join two young physicists on a trip to the east to study the aurora borealis – that first conversation between our planet and its star as a sunsmolar fluctuation to shake the magnetosphere of our Earth, exciting its electrons into magic.
Preparing to capture the indescribable majesty and mystery of world events, Moltke made a mobile studio out of his reindeer sledge and loaded it with his intricate painting materials. (“I realized that it had to be oil paint,” he wrote, “that could most closely depict these amazing events.”) He had read about the northern lights, but nothing had prepared him for this reality.
Not a religious person, he found himself having a profound spiritual experience in the face of these “huge, bright beams with edges… He writes in his memoirs:
The northern lights are like nothing else in our world. They are amazing! It is so beyond human imagination that one cannot help but reach for ideas like “supernatural,” “divine,” “wonderful.” I, who had the courage to try to express these apparently false ideas, fell on my knees spiritually the first time I saw them. I shouldn't be ashamed of that… I then thought of the northern lights as the sparkle in the sky, bright skies and dusk. And then they were independent events with their own light, their own movement, their own evolution, development and movement, its own awakening, development and end and awakening again, its own mysterious occurrence.
It is not insignificant that the word “holy” shares its Latin origin with “all” and has its Indo-European origin in the idea of the unity of all things — the only idea, found in every act of incredible self-indulgence right here on Earth, that sanctifies the whole broken world.
