Stoicism for a Better Life – Weekly exercise (December 27, 2020)
Hello there,
For this week’s exercise, which is the final one of the year, I am going to do something different…something I haven’t yet done. Instead of using a quote and breaking it down, I will leave you with a picture and a short message. The message is something that we should always keep close to our hearts. The picture, it is something I keep on my desktop as a reminder.
But first some context. I have seen a lot of Stoic curious people and Stoic practitioners (Prokoptons) use images of quotes, or Memento Mori calendars, etc. as their backgrounds or on their desktop as a reminder of virtuous ways. Personally, I always found peace, forgiveness, letting go (Amor Fati) and a clear grasp of the value of my time here from the blunt acceptance of my mortality in a single picture. Originally this picture was the iconic “The Blue Marble” taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. Those of you who have read my first book will recognize it from pg 58. It is a reminder of the fragile nature of our planet…how little spe we have in this cosmos. Not only we, but everyone and everything to have come before you and after you.
As Stoics, we must remind ourselves of how little time and space we occupy in the universe in order to remain humble. Egocentrism is our greatest enemy and “The Blue Marble” gave me that perspective. However, in December of 2018, a new picture emerged from a satellite orbiting a relatively small asteroid (500m across) called Bennu. So here I am opening my personal life to you…I give you my desktop picture:
On the upper right hand, you will see the asteroid Bennu itself. What’s interesting about the OSIRIS-REX mission is that the same satellite that took this picture will return samples from Bennu back to earth in 2023. But that’s not what interests me in this picture.
If you direct your attention to the bottom left, you will see a small object, with a tiny dot right next to it. This my friends…this is our humble home and its satellite…it is the earth and the moon. With that image I leave you with the words of Carl Sagan who summarizes my feelings and meditation of this humbling image. I hope it resonates with you and gives you the same freedom from externals as it does me:
“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 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. 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.
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