Hi,
I'm Mark.
And today I want to talk about a stoic practice that asks you to do something quite unusual.
Leave the planet for a minute or two without actually going anywhere.
It's called the view from above.
Now here's the idea.
The Stoic philosopher,
Marcus Aurelius,
Used to imagine himself rising mentally above whatever was happening to him.
Above the room,
Above the city,
Above the country,
And higher still,
Until he could picture the whole earth just turning quietly in space with all of human life happening on its surface at once.
Armies moving,
Weddings taking place,
Arguments breaking out,
People being born and people dying,
All in the same instant.
On the same small planet.
From up there he'd look back down at whatever had been troubling him that morning.
Now,
To be honest,
I want to explain why this works because I don't think it's simply feel small,
Worry less.
That's too simple and honestly,
It's a little bleak.
What actually happens up there is more precise than that.
Distance doesn't make your problem disappear,
It resizes it.
It shows you the true scale of the thing,
Rather than the scale your nervous system has been insisting on since 6am.
Because here's what our minds do almost constantly without asking permission.
They take whatever's directly in front of us and treat it as the entire world.
An argument with someone you love can feel in the moment like the only thing happening on earth.
A mistake at work can feel like the defining fact of your existence.
And in that moment,
It genuinely is the loudest thing in the room.
It's just very rarely the only thing in the world.
The view from above isn't a trick to make you stop caring.
It's a way of remembering that you're one person in one moment inside something enormously larger.
And that most of what feels enormous up close is considerably smaller from a distance.
Marcus used this specifically on the days emperors have to,
Believe it or not,
Frustration with colleagues.
Anger at being disrespected,
The sheer grinding pressure of decisions that mattered.
He'd write to himself,
Picture the whole of humanity from above,
All the different lives being lived at once,
And ask himself,
Does this really deserve the size I'm currently given it?
There's something in this for grief too,
And for joy oddly,
In exactly the same way.
From high enough up,
You can see how briefly any one life occupies its little patch of the picture.
And rather than making things feel meaningless,
Most people find the opposite happens.
Everything down there matters more,
Precisely because none of it lasts.
So here's something to actually try right now.
Think of the thing that's been sitting heaviest on you today.
Now picture yourself rising above it,
Above the room you're in,
Above your street,
Above your city.
Just keep going.
Above the country.
And above the curve of the Earth itself.
Turning quietly below you full of other people in this exact moment living entirely different days.
From up there,
Look back down at the thing that's been weighing on you.
Is it still the same size you thought it was?
That's the practice.
Not to shrink your life,
To see it correctly.
Because most of what troubles us isn't actually as large as it feels from three inches away.
So use the view from above the next time you feel overwhelmed by something and just see if it helps.
Thank you so much for spending this time with me.
With love.
