Point of view

Somewhere in our house, or perhaps now stored with the many books which we've relegated to boxes, is a copy of Powers of Ten. Here's a brief summary of the movie upon which the book was based:

In 1977, Charles and Ray Eames made a nine-minute film called Powers of Ten that still has the capacity to expand the way we think and view our world. Over ten million people have seen the film, and it continues to be shown in classrooms, business meetings, festivals and retreats around the world. Starting with a sleeping man at a picnic, the film takes the viewer on a journey out to the edge of space and then back into a carbon atom in the hand of the man at the picnic, all in a single shot. It is an unforgettable experience. [quoted from the Powers of Ten website].

In the book, each page gives a view that is ten times closer or ten times more distant than the previous page's image. Imagine that you are sitting on a folding chair on the goal line of a football field. A friend is sitting in another chair one yard from you. He snaps his fingers and suddenly you are pushed back to the ten yard line. Another snap and you're a hundred yards off on the opposite goal line. A third snap and you're a thousand yards away—perhaps in the middle of a street many blocks from the stadium. Snap number four and you're 10,000 yards away, more than five and a half miles. Maybe in a different town. Two more snaps and you're a million yards away, 568 miles, about sixty miles more than the distance from San Diego to San Francisco.

Unlike my description which jumps you horizontally away from your friend, the movement in Powers of Ten is vertical: either down through the skin of a hand, or straight up through the atmosphere and off through the solar system, galaxy, and beyond. Either way, one quickly sees how the view changes with each ten-fold change in the distance.

Which brings me to pulling weeds, which are in ample supply at work. Pulling weeds is a close-up activity, where I am forced to attend to details so that the weeds come up and the flowers stay in the ground. Weeds that are a foot from a flower are easy; I just jerk them up, shake off the dirt, and toss them in a pile. But sometimes the weeds have sprouted millimeters from the flower and a more attentive surgical extraction is needed. If there are any ten-fold changes in view here, they are most likely to be from ten inches down to one.

But when I finish weeding—well, abandon it since it's never done—I only need walk across the drive to our building and look back at the little hill where weeds, grasses, and flowers share space, and the view is transformed. A distance of less than ten yards totally changes what I see, and even how I feel about it. Weeds up close irritate me a lot more than weeds at a distance.

Sometime in the past it struck me that speed changes my view of things in a somewhat similar fashion to distance. With distance, moving farther away replaces details with larger, less distinct forms and batches of colors. Up close I can see the bark of a tree. Closer still I can see small insects on the bark or on the leaves. Back away a few hundred yards and I can tell that I'm looking at some woods, but the details are gone.

Speed also makes details vanish. When I walk to work, I can see oddities like the woman pushing her cat in a screened-in baby carriage. I can admire gardens in our neighborhood, inspect the flotsam and jetsam in peoples' yards, resist or yield to temptation as I pass the local bakery (The Big Sky Bread Co. in the old firehouse: such good bread! and cookies!), and generally move at what I call human speed. And, if I may return to weeds for a moment, what about the ones that grow out of cracks in the sidewalk or pavement? Are these not remarkable? Talk about tough!

(What would be the human equivalent to weeds rooted in a bit of sand in a crack next to a busy street? Maybe me buried to my waist in an iceberg floating from Greenland to Newfoundland while subsisting on ice chips scraped off the berg with my fingernails...oh yes, without clothing. How in hell do weeds survive with their roots in two teaspoons of sand? Not just survive, but thrive? Amazing!)

I digress. Bicycling to work, the same journey takes six or seven minutes instead of twenty. I see less because I have to devote more of my attention to cars, railroad tracks, sand or broken glass in the street, and other challenges to safe cycling. In the car, going thirty or thirty-five, most of my attention is given to watching out for my fellow drivers. If I notice flower beds or pedestrians, it is done in quick glances which don't tell me much.

Point of view. As we move away or move faster, details blur. As we slow down or move closer, the small things become clear.