Take a look at the photo below. Do you see the little white dot? Do you know what that is? That little speck is Earth, as seen from the Voyager 1 spacecraft from nearly 4 billion miles away.
Look at tiny pale white spot. That’s where you live, that’s home. Everyone you know, everyone you love, everyone you ever seen or heard of, is there, every living being that there is, lives there. Your family, your friends, your enemies, your colleagues, your loved-ones, they’re all there.
On that small white spot you lived your past, you consume your present, and you expect your future.
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. –Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
Our planet and our lives, what are they? They are just a tiny stage in the vastness of the cosmos. Imagine those generals and emperors who spilled rivers of blood in their dreams of conquering the world, the small dot. Those were great plans if we look at them from a single person’s point of view, but if we change the perspective and look at the object of all those cruelties and wars from this position in space, we may ask ourselves: “was it worth it?”.
Think about how people living in that little pixel are unable to understand each other, think about how frequent their misunderstandings are. Think about how much love is contained within that small dot…
A great method to gain a different perspective on your life is to take a journey, a journey alone to someplace you’ve never been before. I find looking at this picture at least as effective as that.
Imagine how more than 6 billions of people are able to live complex lives inside the fraction of a dot… When seeing things from this perspective, it’s easy to get closer to understanding what matters and what doesn’t.
Next time you want to get unstuck or simply see a problem or issue in your life differently, take a look at this picture and focus on your problem from that distant point of view. It will help you immensely.
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