Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy 4.3

“Yea, airy wings are mine to scale the heights of heaven;

when these the mind has donned,

swiftly she loathes and spurns this earth.

She soars above the sphere of this vast atmosphere,

sees the clouds behind her far;

she passes high above the topmost fires

that seethe above the feverish turmoil of the air,

until she rises to the stars' own home,

and joins her path unto the sun's;

or accompanies on her path the cold and ancient Saturn,

maybe as the shining warrior Mars;

or she may take her course

through the circle of every star that decks the night.

And when she has had her fill of journeying,

then may she leave the sky

and tread the outer plane of the swift moving air,

as mistress of the awful light.

Here holds the King of kings His sway,

and guides the reins of the universe,

and Himself unmoved He drives His winged chariot,

the bright disposer of the world.

And if this path brings you again hither,

the path that now your memory seeks to recall,

I tell you, you shall say,

‘This is my home, hence was I derived,

here shall I stay my course.’

But if you choose to look back upon the earthly night behind you,

you shall see as exiles from light

the tyrants whose grimness made wretched peoples so to fear.”

—from Book 4, Poem 1

Some people like to tell you to “think big”. They say you should leave that small town, and move to the big city. They say you should give up that humble job, and go earn a fancy degree. They say you should walk away from those people who are dragging you down, and go find yourself some better people.

And what is so funny about all of it is that those folks still aren’t thinking big at all. They are still thinking small. They are still concerned with all the petty things in life, with the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the houses they live in, or the friends they associate with.

They are still looking at their lives through immediate circumstances, and not with a sense of greater meaning and value. They say that this is more useful, or that is more pleasant, and all the while they have no greater measure of the true and the good.

Thinking big is looking at things ultimately, not proximately. It isn’t Red Bull that gives you wings, but reason that gives you wings, and with them the power to rise above the particular, and to apprehend the universal. This is the greatness of the human condition, that which can make us big, a mind capable of considering endless being, even as it is wrapped in a small and fragile body.

I can consider myself as a part, however small a speck I might be, within the order of the whole, and it is only then that I truly discover myself. It is only by looking at how the pieces for together in the grand design that their purpose becomes apparent. If I’m only standing there, however, staring at my shoes, oblivious to the bigger picture, then I will be clueless about who I really am, and I will be preoccupied only with the most insignificant of vanities.

We may smile at the old Ptolemaic model of the universe, but is hardly necessary to take it literally here. By rising with my mind above the mundane to the celestial, what seemed so big is actually quite small. I can even move beyond the world of matter as I know it and contemplate what the ancients called the Empyrean, the highest heaven, the realm of the Divine.

I do this whenever I meditate on what is absolute, what is necessary, and what is supreme, and in so doing I recognize that this is my true home, where everything first came from, and to which everything will return. That little clump of earth down there isn’t so impressive after all when seen from up here. There were all these things that frightened me down there, that I felt were overwhelming, but now all the kingdoms and armies and tyrants of the world look more like playthings.

The height is what gives me the greater perspective, but if I descend back down and return to being obsessed with trivialities, I will once again feel the burden of all those worries. I will have made lesser things greater, and greater things lesser.

People will sometimes make fun of those who live according to philosophy, saying they are useless, or that they have their head in the clouds. I suppose it may well look that way to someone who has his head down a hole. What is useful to a man? Counting all the trinkets he has accumulated in his pocket, or considering who he is, why he is here, where he came from, and where he is going?

Why am I so terrified of lawyers, tax collectors, and that bully lurking in the alley?  Because I think that is all there is in this world. They won’t impress me nearly as much if I think bigger.

Written in 10/2015