Sunday Superposition #30

Perspectives on suffering; cancer as a metabolic issue

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A pale blue hill of beans

Here’s lookin’ at you, kid

There’s a great line from near the end of the movie, Casablanca. World War II is raging, and Rick, an American expat living in Morocco, is trying to convince the woman he loves to leave Casablanca with another man. It’s a tough decision, because Rick and Ilsa love each other. They both want her to stay. But Rick knows she’s an important part of this other man’s efforts in the resistance, and it’s better if she leaves. As she deliberates what to do, he delivers the iconic line:

Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.

Rick may have underestimated his character, because for most of us, ignoring our personal problems for the sake of a greater cause would be pretty difficult.

Thinking about our own suffering in a greater context is a good way to do the right thing. But just because our momentary problems don’t seem to amount to much compared with, say, a world war, doesn’t mean our suffering doesn’t matter.

Sometimes people struggle to put their suffering into perspective. They may have no coping mechanisms or no one to support them, so, rather than be crushed by the experience, they denigrate it or deny it altogether.

I thought about that this week when someone posted this meme on social media.

The background image is the famous “Pale Blue Dot.” It was taken when the Voyager 1 spacecraft, a few billion miles into its iconic journey through the Solar System, turned around and snapped a photo of the Earth. From that distance, Earth appears to be nothing more than a fraction of a pixel against a band of reflected sunlight. This was a shocking new perspective of our home, never before seen in 1990 when NASA released it to the public.