Last week, my 11-year-old son, Addison, accompanied my husband on a business trip to New York City. It was his first time in the Big Apple, and he was awed by the towering buildings, the throngs of people and the hum of importance that pulses through Manhattan.
“It feels like the center of the world,” Addison told my husband. Together they walked the Brooklyn Bridge, ascended the Empire State Building, saw "Les Miserables" on Broadway and visited the Apple store on Fifth Avenue not once, but twice.
As the plane took off from New York and headed back toward the Midwest, Addison looked out the window at Manhattan.
“Why, it’s just a tiny island!” he said in surprise. “A tiny island in a state that’s not really that big, in a country that isn’t that big.”
In the 1970s, the cartoonist Saul Steinberg produced a cover for The New Yorker that shows a view of Manhattan from Ninth Avenue, looking across the Hudson River. In the background of the cartoon is “the rest of the world,” a thin slice of flat land with just a few cities (Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C.) spilling into the Pacific Ocean, with distant mountains depicting China, Russia and Japan.
“View of the World from 9th Avenue” is regarded as one of the greatest magazine covers of the modern day, depicting in a simple sketch the self-importance with which New Yorkers see themselves.
However, what was once a parody on New Yorkers seems to have become a parody for the everyday man or woman. The rate at which we take offense, demand happiness, allow envy to rule our actions and turn the cameras on ourselves is all evidence that we are looking at the world not through a wide-angle lens, but through a telescope.
Despite knowing for centuries that we are not the center of the universe, we have come to believe that life does indeed revolve around us, selfie stick in hand. We have all become “View of the World from My Smartphone.”
Galileo would be appalled.
Children and teenagers are naturally self-centered. Their world-view is as large as the view from their high chair. As their world expands, so does their sense of place in that world: first the bedroom, then the house, then the yard, the park, the city, the state, the country.
With that awareness should come an expanding sense of others. In fact, one of the defining characteristics of true adulthood is a lack of self-centeredness.
One of the reasons marriage has long been a benchmark of adulthood is because it forces a person to sacrifice on someone else’s behalf not just occasionally, but over and over again. When we marry, we take a decisive step away from self. The addition of children pushes selfishness even further away. You can’t be selfish about a good night’s rest when there is a baby demanding to be fed.
Successful families are built on mountains of sacrifice. Yet as the rising generation of millennials postpone marriage and children, or forego these choices altogether, they risk losing the natural consequence of maturity that comes from caring for and nurturing others.
Of course, there are other ways to mature into an outwardly focused person. Serving others gives us perspective and time away from introspection.
Faith and belief in God also turn the lens outward. When we drop to our knees in prayer, the communication is not about us. It’s about a relationship with an all-powerful deity. If done appropriately, it should be less about talking and more about listening.
Reading scripture gives us that scope as well. There are reminders of two things: You are nothing, and God loves you anyway. These alternating messages run throughout the scriptures. God wants us to understand that we ourselves are powerless, that in an instant we can be swept away, be buried, be burned or fall through a crack in the earth and die. At the same time, he reminds us over and over that we are numbered by him, right down to the hairs on our heads. The journey of faith is one in which we must constantly lay ourselves aside in order to become the person God wants us to be. Faith provides the ultimate perspective.
It is good, in our daily lives, in our daily interactions, to keep our finger on the zoom lens. There are times for zooming out, to remember we are a tiny island in a small state in a small country, and that our problems are not as big as they may seem. There are times for zooming in, to focus and make a difference in our own homes. And yes, there are even times for flipping that camera around on ourselves for a bit of self-examination.
The key, of course, is to not keep it there for long.
Tiffany Gee Lewis lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is the mother of four boys. She blogs at thetiffanywindow.wordpress.com. Her email is tiffanyelewis@gmail.com.