I love to fly. This is fortunate, I suppose, because I seem do it a lot. Perhaps I was a bird in a previous life.
The most interesting part of airplane travel is the ascent from the ground up to the clouds. That’s the time when all the commonplace objects like trees and cars and buildings recede in space, shrinking as if by shrink-rays to become miniature objects in a diarama. They granulate from their familiar, imposing hunks of mass to almost invisible details on the skin of the world like tiny mites on the forehead of a giant.
Sometimes it’s just as interesting to descend from the clouds. That’s the time when the tiny green specks sprout up to become full-sized maple trees and teeny colored toys become full-sized Corollas and Impalas and F-150s. (And, on the very occasional flight, if you’re lucky, you might even see the miniature shadow of your own airplane zipping along the terrain below, and you watch it as it grows, slowly, dependably approaching you, until it finally reaches out to catch the plane as it touches down on the runway.)
I remember when I was a kid I saw a short animated movie from the National Film Board of Canada called Cosmic Zoom. It begins with a boy in a row boat with his dog. And then the shot zooms out, farther and farther and impossibly farther until the lake, the land and all the world shrinks into the distance of space, and eventually the whole galaxy shrinks as the shot keeps zooming out until all the galaxies in the universe minify to become tiny insignificant flotsam and jetsam floating in vast darkness. Then the zoom stops and after a pause, it begins to reverse itself. Eventually it returns to the boy, and then zooms in on his arm where there is a mosquito and keeps zooming in deeper into a mocrospcopic journey down to the subatomic realm that also appears to be mostly comprised of darkness and emptiness, similar to the perspective we had all the way out there in space.
The extreme macro and the extreme micro bring us to the same perspective — that’s a link! Different perspectives converge on the same picture.
Questions abound. Is every atom its own universe? Is every universe its own atom? Are there limits to the smallness of the physical world or limits to the bigness of the physical world? What is the smallest unit we can measure? What is the largest?
Eventually, as we reach the physical limitations of our ability to measure things, further analysis leaps over into the theoretical realms of the spiritual, the philosophical, the mathematical…
The Dalai Lama wrote a book called The Universe in a Single Atom where he discusses the overlap of Buddhism and science. He asserts that Buddhism and science share a common commitment using empirical evidence to understand the nature of reality. That’s a link!
Coming back to your airplane travel, those cars that you see out the window are simultaneously dainty toys and two-ton machines, depending on your perspective. Those trees are simultaneously tiny and enormous, depending on your perspective. Single objects can be simultaneously trivial and monumental. That’s a link!
Any person is simultaneously a singular, unique individual in the span of the universe and also just another monkey who puts on pants one leg at a time. A person is simultaneously important to some people, and also unimportant to others. Every life is simultaneously a fascinating movie and a boring statistic. That’s a link!
And so it is with everything. Your perspective shows how things are, and what things are in relation to each other and in relation to yourself, the viewer of things.
This is an empowering thought, because it means you can choose to actively change your perspective.
The term “coming at something from a different perspective” usually describes a situation where someone establishes a unique observation. When people don’t “see eye-to-eye,” that means they seem to have different perspectives of the same subject. When someone has “a new take on an old theme,” that person introduces a new perspective to a familiar topic.
You may have had the experience of visiting a place that held special significance in your childhood – such as the giant diving board at the swimming pool or the giant slide at the play park – and when you revisit it you realize it was not so grand as you had remembered it. When you see it later in life, you think to ourself, “This is it? It looks so much smaller now. I remember it seeming so intimidating back then.” The same landmark creates divergent perspectives. That’s a link!
In these situations, the places and the objects remained the same, but the thing that changed was you. You grew up, you got older, you lived through more experiences, more references, more ways of seeing the world. You left the life you had as a child and, coming back to your childhood landmark years later, you see it from a new perspective.
Here’s something to chew on: If you could travel into an atom deep enough, impossibly deep, on a scale that equates the tiny atom to the vastness of our known universe, would you discover a subatomic solar system containing a subatomic planet earth containing a subatomic neighborhood containing a subatomic version of you yourself reading these words on your subatomic device?
Whether the answer is yes or the answer is no, that’s a link!