These are the real wonders of the world.
There’s a story behind that.
This is your daily message from Chad number 1145 to upgrade your mental game today by telling yourself a better story, because the most important story you hear is the story you tell yourself. And this message is dedicated to Kayla Moon, in celebration of her birthday. You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at http://www.fromchad.com.
Here’s the upgrade:
You think the wonders of the world are things you visit, but upgraded thinking knows the real wonder of the world is the one looking at them.
Here’s the story:
In June of 1995 Maya Angelou stood in San Francisco at the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, in the same city where the UN Charter was signed. It was only the second time in her life she had been asked to write for a moment this size — two years before, she read at a presidential inauguration. She wrote a new poem for the occasion titled “A Brave and Startling Truth” and in it she calls Earth small and lonely, drifting through space past stars that don’t notice us. A speck of dust, adrift among indifferent suns.
That description didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from fifty years of humanity slowly learning just how small we actually are. It started October 24, 1946, when scientists strapped a movie camera into the nose of a captured German V-2 rocket in the New Mexico desert. It climbed 65 miles up, snapped a frame every second and a half, then slammed back into the sand. The camera was destroyed, but the film survived. For the first time, humans saw the curve of their own planet.
It would be another 20 years, in 1967, before a satellite camera would capture the first full-color photograph of the whole Earth, hanging complete and round against black space. A year later during the Apollo 8 mission, three astronauts were circling the moon on Christmas Eve 1968 with cameras pointed at craters, when the capsule rolled and Earth rose over the horizon, blue and alone. In 1972, Apollo 17 turned a camera back one last time on the way to the moon and caught the whole lit Earth in a single frame — still the most reproduced photograph ever taken.
Then, on Valentine’s Day, 1990, Voyager 1 was 3.7 billion miles out, beyond Neptune, done photographing planets. NASA was about to powerdown the cameras to conserve energy as Voyager headed out of our solar system. Carl Sagan asked NASA to turn the camera around once more before it shut off forever. They did. Earth showed up as a single pixel of light, caught inside a stray sunbeam. Sagan spent the next four years writing about that pixel in his book Pale Blue Dot— everyone who ever lived, he said, lived their whole life on that dot.
A year later, Angelou stepped to the podium in San Francisco with all of this behind her — the grainy rocket photo, the full disk, the Earthrise, the Blue Marble, the pale dot. Every image had said the same thing: we’re small, we’re alone out here, we’re easy to miss. And she took that same small speck and turned it inside out. Not small like insignificant. Small like precious. She named the pyramids, the Grand Canyon, the Danube, Mount Fuji — the wonders we’ve always pointed to — and said none of them are the real one. We are. Capable of cruelty that can stab a heart and capable of singing songs that stop the heart. That contradiction isn’t a flaw. It’s the miracle.
The better story to tell yourself is, “I will live like the wonder of the world I am.” It’s easy to get mired in the mundane and lose touch with the miracle of the journey. It’s startling when you stop and consider it. Fifty years of cameras pointed at Earth, and it took a poet to tell us what we were actually looking at. I read this poem back in episode 387 titled “More That Unites” if you’d like to hear the poem. It stuck with me then. It still does.
Tell me a story of wonder of humanity to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and tell them, “You’re the wonder of the world.”
