It has been a while since I flew in an airplane [1], but when I flew a lot more often, I generally preferred to sit at the window seat. The reason for this was because whether I was flying in daytime or in darkness, I loved to look outside from my window and see the world below. The world looks a lot different from above. When one is walking or riding a bicycle or driving a car, one’s vision is generally limited by what one can see, and that is often not particularly long. From the sky, one can see patterns that are not readily visible from the ground. Yet something is lost as well when it is gained, as it does not take being very high before one loses sight of the individuals that make up our world and our lives. While taking off and landing, one can see the cars on the roadway, but from miles in the sky, one cannot easily identify the people or places one sees below, although one can tell the differences in terrain and at night can gather a rough estimate of the size of a city or town by the spread of its lights.

Little children live in a world of giants, of large distances and massive spaces. When I was an adult and returned to the place where I spent most of the years of my youth [2], it struck me just how small the place was, and yet this place held many of the hopes and fears of a lonely and melancholy boy. Yet this place was so much bigger when I was a kid than it was when I was an adult; I had changed, I had moved elsewhere and my world and my hopes and fears had gotten larger, and the strawberry farms outside of Plant City had not changed nearly so much. One of my dear little friends has often moped around unhappily, unable to find her mother, when her mother is within fairly easy eyesight for me. Yet often I have had to point out where the girl is to go to find her mother, to see her walk off in the wrong direction before she wanders close enough to see her mother with her own eyes. Little ones see the world through different eyes, and much of the world of big people seems confusing to them, and it can be as hard to see the little ones in a crowd as it is for them to see us, unless we are trained to look carefully at what normally escapes our attention.

There is no safety either in looking down on life or looking up. From the top, we are visible to all, and being visible often makes one a target of others. Yet there is no safety at all either in being small and vulnerable and seemingly invisible, as there are some people whose attentiveness to little ones is not kindly in nature. In the movie Avatar, the dramatic riding of the top predator of the forest canopy requires that the film’s hero is aware of animal psychology, in that the top predator does not look up at any potential threat from above because he feels secure from any attack from below. As human beings, in a practical sense, we do not look above in fear of judgment because we look below and see a world under our dominion which we rule and misrule at our pleasure, subject only to threats from our peers, namely other human beings. Yet for all of this we are not safe in our world, and our sleep is filled with dark dreams and visions about the fears that haunt our waking lives and then decide that we are not troubled enough then to escape from our difficulties when we close our eyes to sleep. Often as people our concerns are deeply individual, and when we look down from lofty heights, we see numbers and data and aggregates, but not people as they are with their hopes and dreams, their longings, their struggles, and we make broad decisions based on those large concerns and not with a knowledge of how it will affect the individual people who we are meant to serve.

This tension between macro and micro is a serious one, and an insoluble one. In order to gain a grasp of the larger picture, we need to look with a macro perspective, yet in doing so we lose sight of the individual humanity that life is filled with. Yet if we focus only on the individual people around us, or that we care about, we do not grasp the larger forces and context of our times. Every decision made to take a higher and higher look leaves us with less attention paid and less knowledge of the personal and the particular. Escaping from this conundrum is a difficult one, but at least as human beings we can seek to manage as best as we are able by seeking a high look to grasp larger trends and respond to them effectively, while seeking a lower look in order to deal with people as people on an individual level, so that each person may perform their part in the larger picture as best as possible. Yet wherever we gain in a particular perspective in one area, we lose in another. Our lives are full of tradeoffs, and all too late we realize that we failed to appreciate what one aspect of life had to offer because our vision was too narrow, and we were not taking into account all that was needful where we happened to be. Yet while we cannot return back to bygone days and correct our vision accordingly, we may at least learn how to live better in the future according to the time and circumstances that we have been given to manage.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/the-longest-day/

[2] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/cork-station/