Space, Part 1: Stepping Backwards

All of this time, centuries of exploration, decades of inaccuracies, until all at once we discovered, sometime about the middle of the 20^th century, our basic problem: we simply had not gotten far enough off the ground to make a perfect map of it. From the time of the ancient Greeks, men like the scholar Ptolemy have been trying to sketch the world as they knew it, but they knew very little of it. Of course, Ptolemy and his cohorts were quite intelligent, but the information they had was not enough. So they drew maps of deformed continents and absent Americas.

As centuries progressed, maps grew more accurate. But mostly, they were for the locals. That is, we had maps from this farm to that, from this tribe’s territory to that one’s. All the while, we could make only estimates about what the whole world actually looked like. Then something happened. We learned to fly. We learned to make cameras, and later satellites. We crossed the final frontier. We stood closer to the moon than to the Earth. And then we understood. We stood back, took a breath, and the view took our breath away. We knew what our home truly looked like. For the first time, we had hung a mirror in the sky. We saw our own smallness, but we saw the largeness of the community in which we lived. No longer was there this village or that village, there was country upon continent between the vastness of oceans. And we were changed because we looked upon the homeland and the land of our ancestors from the back of a bird. We were frightfully small.

Though I call it our land, I imagine when the first satellite images returned to humankind, the first thing humankind noticed was not its own handiwork. Instead they probably looked first at the oceans and the mountains and continents— the biggest things, the handiwork of God. But the grand view came only after years of searching, of exploring, of trying, and of failing.

And here is a little metaphor for life. Sometimes, the clearest picture comes from far away. Sometimes it takes a friend to point out a seemingly obvious solution to a personal problem. Sometimes, the one step back enables the two steps forward. Sometimes, people get so afraid that their own mind places them out of their skin. Some conflicts are resolved with merely a bit of “space.”

But what is so powerful about this emptiness called space, this stunning absence of closeness? The secret is this: Space is not emptiness at all. Rather, space is splendidly full. When we take the great step back, we discover that only our perception, only the limit of our cones and rods, has created the smallness of the situation, and the nothingness beyond it. Distance then is absolutely imperative. If we are to rightly understand problems and solutions and wonders and norms, we must step back, and keep stepping back, until we can no longer breathe—until the beauty of the view and the absence of the atmosphere steal the air from our lungs. Glory! Truly, we’ve much exploring to do.