So a few posts back I discussed the brilliance and beauty of astronomical photographs.
The idea that all this magnificence is above our heads every day and every second but we never make the effort to look up and think. Neither do we really look around, never wondering e.g. at the fact that every tree we see grew out of a tiny nut or seed, or consider the breeze that brushes your skin as part of a giant global weather system, pushing and gusting, sinking and rising, coating the earth. The breeze on your back has been passed, grown, shrunk and diverted from a gale, storm or hot afternoon anywhere in the world.
When I started really thinking and appreciating these things we take for granted, it felt like an epiphany, and I am very much in the long-haired, sandal-wearing, lentil-eating minority.
We do not live in sync with the natural light and dark, so right now for example, I am awake at 11.39, it’s been dark for about 4 hours, but I’m awake just because I haven’t gone to bed yet. We inhabit the night, through our own light, probably more than any other generation. But most people before wide-spread artificial lighting would live in a blue-skied world. When it was dark, and the stars were out, most people would go to sleep.
It is quite obvious that the world around us shapes the way we have evolved, shapes the way we live, the way our senses work, even the way we speak and understand each other. Our minds, our thinking, our philosophies and senses, have all evolved under a comfortably close, blue sky curtain.
Living in the day, only seeing as far as our own atmosphere, shelters our minds from the giant universe beyond. I almost said “unfathomably giant.” Perhaps we are small-minded earthy creatures, with delusions of grandeur, because we are fish caught in a rock pool unable to see the sea. And we think small as a result.
Clearly if we look out at night we can see the stars and the planets, and a fascinations with heavenly bodies is present in all cultures, but it does not confront us on a constant or daily basis prompting to consider our insignificance, or the nature of the universe.
Perhaps if we had evolved under open infinities, our mental capacities would be grander and perhaps more developed for big ideas, big numbers, big spaces, big questions. Without the blue-sky curtain, we’d develop as a small part of the eternal ocean, rather than kings of our little rock pool, panicking and refusing to worry about things outside. Even denying that the sea exists.
Blue-sky thinking should actually be considered a closed, limited, geocentric way of brain-storming. Your thoughts can grow and soar unconfined by blue at night, when the universe is your shellfish of choice, and the tide meets the rock-pool allowing you to float across.
