The View From Nowhere.
What's left when no one else is watching?
In 2015, the astronaut Scott Kelly spent three hundred and forty days on the International Space Station.
For nearly a year he lived in a metal tube the size of a six-bedroom house, weightless, sleepless, circling the Earth sixteen times a day.
The sun rose and set every ninety minutes.
There was no night that lasted longer than forty-five minutes.
No weather. No birds. No traffic.
No opinions from friends back home about what he should do with his life.
Everything that usually tells us who we are, or who we should be, wasn’t there.
No one could see what he looked like. No one could judge his accent, his clothes, his mood, or his behavior.
No likes, no dislikes.
No comments. No approval. No rejection.
No social cues or expectations.
Just the hum of fans, and the majestic view of our planet below.
He said the silence and isolation were difficult at first, but over time they stripped away the noise of life on Earth and forced him to confront who he really was, and what actually mattered.
Not many of us will ever get this kind of opportunity.
To have no mask.
No role to play.
No version of yourself you need to sell to anyone.
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.” — Bernard M. Baruch
When there’s no audience, there’s no need to perform.
But without all the usual mirrors telling us who to be, something essential becomes apparent: who we really are.
Or, for most of us, how little we know the answer to that question.
We derive so much of our sense of self from our titles, our relationships, our achievements, the ways we are recognized in the world.
We build our entire identity from it.
But without that external feedback, what is left?
In the absence of external feedback, Scott Kelly met the real version of himself.
Not an astronaut. Not an American. Not a hero or a husband or a son.
Just a man.
He said the silence he found up there never really left him. It became the reference point he could return to whenever life back on Earth tried to pull him away from himself.
Most of us will never spend a year in space. But we don’t need to.
The same silence is available to us, right here.
Step away from the noise.
Put down the phone.
Stop performing.
Just be.
Raw.
Unfiltered.
Unpolished.
The world can use more real.
One Step Toward the Real You
You don’t have to become an astronaut to get to know yourself.
Just create a small, deliberate pocket of “nowhere” in your own life.
Spend time alone.
Have a morning with no people, no plan, no schedule.
Not to become more productive.
Just to be silent. And to remove external mirrors long enough to figure out who you are underneath.
One Thought Worth Keeping
Not a thought, but a poem this week:
Totally conscious, and apropos of nothing, you come to me.
Is someone here? I ask.
The moon. The full moon is inside your house.
My friends and I go running out into the street.
I’m in here, comes a voice from the house,
but we aren’t listening.
We’re looking up at the sky.
My pet nightingale sobs like a drunk in the garden.
Ringdoves scatter with small cries, Where, Where.
It’s midnight. The whole neighborhood
is up and out in the street
thinking, The cat burglar has come back.
The actual thief is there too, saying out loud,
Yes, the cat burglar is somewhere in this crowd.
No one pays attention.
Lo, I am with you always means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,
or things that have happened to you
There’s no need to go outside.
Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.
A white flower grows in the quietness.
Let your tongue become that flower.
– Jalaluddin Rumi
In the end, the greatest distance any of us will ever travel is not to the stars.
It is the distance between the person the world taught us to be and the person we actually are.
The view from nowhere is the clearest view you’ll get.
With love,
Lilé
See you next week.
Prachtig verhaal