Le Malaise

Contemplating the universe was a form of therapy for the ancients. Seeing the Big Picture puts our own troubles and anxieties into a cosmic perspective, so that our anxious egos become stilled with wonder and awe. Aurelius tells himself: ‘Survey the circling stars, as though yourself were in mid-course with them. Often picture the changing and re-changing dance of the elements. Visions of this kind purge away the dross of our earth-bound life.’    Contemplating the stars elevates our spirit, and makes our day-to-day concerns seem insignificant. Aurelius writes: ‘Many of the anxieties that harass you are superfluous: being but creatures of your own fancy, you can rid yourself of them and expand into an ampler region, letting your thought sweep over the entire universe, contemplating the illimitable tracts of eternity.’    The View from Above is what psychologists call a distancing or minimization technique. It’s a method of zooming out from your life, placing it in a cosmic perspective, and thereby gaining a measure of detachment. We say that anxious or depressed people ‘make a mountain out of a molehill,’ zooming in on their problems until each little obstacle seems of enormous and terrible proportions. We can practice doing the opposite, zooming out, widening our perspective to cosmic dimensions so that we make a molehill of every mountain.