Witness 15: Just Here on Earth
Or, perhaps somewhere in space
A QUIET JOY
FROM YOU
On a recent flight back home, I decided to ignore the stack of magazines I bought in a rush at the airport shop and look out the window instead. It's weird but I never usually look, even when I have a window seat. I'm not the most calm of fliers, so I'll do anything I can to distract myself from the fact that we're flying through the air. But, this time, I looked. I felt like I'd been hypnotised by the clouds changing colours and looking down at the fields. For a moment, I lost all track of time, place and even who I was, and everything made sense.
Katy, Edinburgh
A REFLECTION FROM ME
We all have those niche topics or facts that endlessly fascinate us, the ones that we long to tell the nearest person who'll listen. It's one of my favourite things about humans, the completely different things that light us up that become our “special subjects”. I have many, but one of mine is The Overview Effect, coined by Frank White, author and space philosopher.
Put simply, it's the feeling and emotions that astronauts get when they leave Earth and have the incredibly beautiful and privileged experience (that such a tiny percentage of us will ever have), of looking back at it from a different perspective. Understandably, they are filled with awe, wonder and interconnectedness, when they can't see the so-called borders that separate us.
We can experience this on airplanes, in meditation or in those moments when we lose track of time and all the things that consume us, and instead connect to the vastness of who we are and where we are. That feeling of floating up in space and seeing our planet is incredibly moving to me. To see a blue sphere holding everyone you love, everywhere you've been, our collective story, and how tiny it looks in the hugeness of space. Goosebumpingly good.
Floating in space is exactly how I feel right now. I'm in the dark. Boy, am I in the dark and it can be scary to float in that without the cushion of certainty. What's keeping me afloat is love and the softest whisper of knowing within me. So, I'm surrendering into it, I've been doing a lot of meditation, deep listening, yoga nidra, and reflecting. To tap into a state that is beyond what I can see, comprehend or plan, and instead find a space to be.
It's a precious reminder that we can connect to wonder, peace, love and abundance by closing our eyes, drifting and imagining. Deep rest. Yes, reality will still be there once we're done, and this is not a way to distract from what we're going through, but to rest them down for a moment so we are better able to cope.
That's the beauty of practices like meditation or even just floating in dream state, we get access to everything we can't tangibly experience or understand in words. Just like being outside of Earth to have a more profound awareness of being on Earth and what it means to be human.
You and I might not be heading to space anytime soon, but we do get to witness the magnificence of living on this planet and how connected we all are, just by being present.
Each day is an exploration of life. A probing. An adventure.
All we need to do is see it as such.