One of his tests was to do a spacewalk around his lunar module, in which he floated 160 miles above the earth. As he gazed at the planet circling below him, he experienced a profound shift in perspective. Like all of us, he had been brought up to think in terms of different countries with borders between them. But now he lost his identity as an American astronaut, and felt “part of everyone and everything sweeping past me below.” As he described it:
“When you go around the Earth in an hour and half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with the whole thing…You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again, and you don’t even see them…[F]rom where you see it, the thing is a whole, the earth is a whole, and it’s so beautiful. You wish you could take a person in each hand, one from each side in the various conflicts, and say, “Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What’s important?” ...<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...
