{"id":12575,"date":"2026-03-12T21:22:57","date_gmt":"2026-03-13T01:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/an-astronauts-antidote-to-despair-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T21:22:57","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T01:22:57","slug":"an-astronauts-antidote-to-despair-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/an-astronauts-antidote-to-despair-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"An Astronaut\u2019s Antidote to Despair \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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Once our basic physical needs for sustenance and shelter are met, most of our psychological suffering is a problem of selfing \u2014 contracting the scope of reality to the pinhole of the self and using that to explain, always painfully, the actions and motives of others, the course and causality of events. As this cognitive corkscrew of rumination burrows deeper and deeper into the inner world, the outer \u2014 the world of clouds and crocuses and flickering spring light \u2014 recedes further and further past the horizon of our awareness, isolating us from all that is beautiful and true and full of wonder. Despair is nothing more than the pinch of the pinhole, reducing the immense vista of reality to a particular interpretation of a particular moment. <\/p>\n

The more we unself by widening the aperture to let the world in, the less we suffer. This is why seeing with an astronaut\u2019s eyes<\/a> may be the most powerful, most salutary lens-clearing, for astronauts alone can widen the aperture enough to see the whole world, rising and setting against the black austerity of spacetime as a single blue marble, all of our sorrows and worries swirling there remote as the Cambrian. <\/p>\n

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View from inside the ISS. (Image: NASA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While orbiting a war-torn world aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Chris Hadfield took questions from earthlings in a Reddit AMA<\/a>. Asked for his advice to anyone on the brink of giving up and his own approach to those moments of darkest despair, he offers:<\/p>\n

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I remind myself that each sunrise is a harbinger of another chance, and to take quiet, unrecognised pride in the accomplishments I get done each day. Each evening my intended list is unfinished, but I celebrate what I\u2019ve done, and resolve to do better tomorrow. Also, nothing is ever as good or as bad as it first seems. Keep at it with optimism \u2014 it is your<\/em> life to tinker with, learn from, live and love.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This ongoingness of creation \u2014 the fact that this world is unfinished and our story unwritten<\/a> \u2014 is nowhere more visible, life\u2019s ceaseless insistence on itself nowhere more palpable, than when seen on the scale of the entire planet. Hadfield captures this elemental calibration of perspective:<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s endlessly surprising how continually beautiful our changing, ancient, gorgeous Earth is. Every one of my 1,650 orbits, I saw something new. And I was up long enough to watch the seasons swap ends on the planet, like Mother Earth taking one breath out of 4.5 billion breaths.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A single gasp of elemental beauty is enough to reanimate the deflated lung of life, to undermine the narratives of despair. \u201cThey should have sent a poet,\u201d gasps Jodie Foster\u2019s astronaut character in the film based on Carl Sagan\u2019s novel Contact<\/em>, and it is with a poet\u2019s sensibility that Hadfield describes one such living antidote to despair \u2014 the Bahamas, seen from space in all their \u201chuge visual onslaught of coral reefs and shallows, pierced by the deep tongue of the ocean that gives it a butterfly-like iridescence of every blue that exists.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The Bahamas seen from the ISS. (Image: NASA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Before we lifted off from Earth toward the farthest reachable reaches of the cosmic unknown, those last unexplored frontiers of the unknown were the extremes of Earth itself \u2014 the poles. Polar explorers were the astronauts of the nineteenth century. <\/p>\n

Many died to know the unknown. <\/p>\n

Many sank into \u201csoul-despairing depression\u201d<\/a> during the six-month polar nights, black and edgeless as spacetime. <\/p>\n

Over and over, they were saved by wonder<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Northern Lights by Harald Moltke, 1900.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the first year of the twentieth century \u2014 that liminal epoch between the age of polar exploration and the age of space exploration \u2014 the twenty-nine-year-old Danish artist Harald Moltke was invited to join two young physicists on a polar expedition to study the aurora borealis<\/a> \u2014 that elemental conversation between our planet and its star as fluctuations of the Sun\u2019s corona send gusts of solar wind across the cosmos to ripple our Earth\u2019s magnetosphere, exciting its electrons into magic. <\/p>\n

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Northern Lights by Harald Moltke, 1900.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Setting out to capture the ineffable majesty and mystery of Earth\u2019s most otherworldly phenomenon, Moltke made a mobile studio of his reindeer sledge and loaded it with his elaborate painting equipment. (\u201cI realized that it had to be oil paint,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthat could most closely reproduce these fantastic phenomena.\u201d) He had read about the northern lights, but nothing had prepared him for the embodied encounter. <\/p>\n

Not a religious man, he found himself having a profoundly spiritual experience when faced with these \u201chuge, luminous beams with folds\u2026 now shining brightly, now fading away to arise elsewhere\u2026 like keys on which invisible hands begin to play, back and forth, back and forth.\u201d He writes in his memoir:<\/p>\n

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The northern lights are like nothing else on our planet. They are breathtaking! They surpass all human imagination to such an extent that one cannot help but reach for notions like \u201csupernatural,\u201d \u201cdivine,\u201d \u201cmiraculous.\u201d I, who had been so bold as to dare to portray these seemingly unreal visions, sank to my knees spiritually the first time I saw them. I need not be ashamed of that\u2026 I had imagined the northern lights as clearings in the sky, luminous domes and twilights. And then they were independent phenomena with their own light, their own movement, their own emergence, development and movement, its own resurrection, development and ending and resurrection again, its own mysterious unfolding.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Northern Lights by Harald Moltke, 1901.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is not unimportant that the word \u201choly\u201d shares its Latin root with \u201cwhole\u201d and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things \u2014 the only perspective, available in every act of unselfing with wonder right here on Earth, that hallows a broken world whole. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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