Today’s thought is about looking up.Have you heard of the Overview Effect? It’s a psychological phenomenon so common among those who have traveled out into space that they’ve given it a name.Wikipedia describes the Overview Effect as the “cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space … a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities.” A state of awe means of course that something you’re experiencing is overwhelming. Self-transcendent is a fancy way to say that overwhelming experience is changing you and growing you beyond who you were before. The most common effect of experiencing the Earth from space are an “… appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole.” And here’s my favorite part … “the effect can cause changes in the observer’s self concept and value system.”I’ve never heard anyone explain the Overview Effect better than Apollo 14 astronaut, Edgar Mitchell—the sixth human being to ever walk on the surface of the moon—who described how he felt the first time he saw the earth hanging silently like a tiny blue marble in the vast blackness of space in the kind of language you’d expect from a man who was both a scientist and a Navy test pilot:“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon … politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck, drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”Ladies and gentlemen, the Overview Effect. I can imagine a day not too long from now when perhaps it will be common for anyone to go into space and hopefully experience the Overview Effect for themselves. And perhaps when that day comes things down here will really begin to change. But if we’re going to make it to that day a whole lot more of us down here need to spend a whole lot more time looking up.Why? Because in my view we all need that “appreciation and perception of beauty,” that “increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole,” and most of all we could all use those changes to our, “self concept and value system.”We need to spend more time looking up from our tiny self-consumed existence. Look up from trying to make a name for ourselves, from our hurtful “win at all cost” attitudes, from “my way or the highway” perspectives. Look up from our reality TV shows and smart phones and social media pages and our endless guzzling of bad news from everywhere all the time all at once. We need to look up from the endless political BS. Look up from all the labels that we constantly hang on everyone because labels are just intellectually lazy ways of pretending you know everything about a person you’ve never met. Look up because we judge far too quickly, we assume far too much, and we know far too little. Look up because, as one of my favorite poets, the Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry, puts it, “The earth is poisoned with narrow lives.” And finally, we need to look up because Horatio, my friend, “There are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”I know I’m a couple of weeks late figuring out my resolution for 2023. But better late than never. I think I’d like this year to be one for even more looking up. And if you’d like to join me then perhaps we could both experience that Overview Effect together and, who knows, find ourselves changed for the better and well on our way to building ourselves a beautiful life.
