How a Meteor Shower demonstrates Perspective
This past week many people have been watching the Perseids meteor shower. Named for where it shows up in the night sky, the shower of debris from comets appears in the northern hemisphere around the Perseus constellation. When we look at the night sky, we can observe streaks of light that come one after the other. The movement is created as the debris burns up in Earth's atmosphere. This movement is surrounded by a background of stationary stars lighting the night sky. It's as if someone is painting streaks of light creating a temporary piece of art for the observer.
This is a beautiful perspective and it is a great example of how we can choose to experience the world around us. Imagine if we took a different, more negative perspective of this event? A perspective that breeds fear of the earth being pelted by billions of pieces of rock and ice for weeks during the month of August? People would react accordingly from a place of fear and choose to hide away to protect themselves from perceived danger. In both cases, the same event is happening, but the experience is completely different. The information is the same, but how it is interpreted creates two very different outcomes.
Some people live their lives looking at the world in the former sense, through a lens of seeing beauty. Others live their lives looking at the world in the latter sense, seeing only potential destruction. And both perspectives are true for the observer. They are real experiences with real impacts emotionally, physically and psychologically. Each perspective is valid because it is based on lived experience. However, if we know that both options exist, and we know that we have the power to choose either one, we empower ourselves to choose how we want to experience life. We don't control that the meteor shower is happening, we don't control any potential of a piece of rock hurtling to earth and striking the ground, and we don't control how other people choose to experience the event. We do control how we want to perceive it and how we treat others who see it differently.
The meteor shower is a seemingly chaotic event and if you believe the hermetic principle of “as above, so below,” you may see the shower as a reflection of what is happening in our broader world - a deluge of seemingly chaotic things all coming at us, and over which we have no control. This can feel overwhelming to comprehend, and can make us feel helpless and confused. But if we step back from it and realize that each of us only experiences the chaos from one perspective - our own - we can begin to shrink the events down to a more manageable experience over which we do have control - ourselves.
I for one sometimes feel overwhelmed by the confusion because I don’t know what I can do to help change the larger problems in the world right now. It is in these moments I remind myself that it is the culmination of all our collective perspectives that can influence other people and change an entire narrative. I'm not trying to simplify the complexity of what is happening in the world. I'm simply trying to say that solutions to complex chaos start with each of us individually.
The values we choose, the kindness we show, the community we build and how we treat others. All of this comes together and gets reflected back to us. So as I see it, our job as beings living on this earth, is to use our power of choice to bring light where there is dark and influence the world we want to see with the one thing we do control - our personal choice.
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