Chaos and Cosmos

As many people know, traveling can be an extremely stressful experience. For some the lows outweigh the highs.  The sleepless airplane rides, never knowing where to get a decently priced meal, never knowing how to act, how to dress, but also soaking every bit of new information up, trying to absorb it all so you will never forget, and feeling yourself changed by it all.

Now imagine living abroad. There are some differences but also many similarities to traveling. It is like traveling for the however many months you are abroad for. The same highs and the same lows, over and over again. You have to consciously work at being comfortable. Nothing comes easily. That is both the fun and the anxious part of being an expat.

I particularly have had to work extra hard at settling into France.  When I went away to college for the first time that transition took nearly a year until I felt comfortable and confident again. This transition has been somewhat eased by the fact that I did study abroad in the same country as well as that I live with my boyfriend here. I imagine it would be much more difficult doing this experience alone for the first time.  Even so, I believe that no matter if you are alone, with your friends, or if this is your first or tenth time coming to France, there will always be an unsettling of yourself at first.

However, as a 22 year old recent graduate I find many of these unsettling feelings could also be attributed to the fact that I have just been dumped out into the world after living all my life with the reassuring structure of education.  This structure has given meaning to my life and now I find myself asking: now what? What is the point now?

To anyone who may be experiencing these kind of unsettled anxieties I would highly recommend watching the much-acclaimed thirteen-part series from 1980, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, created by astronomer Carl Sagan (the entire series can be viewed on Netflix and YouTube free of cost).  I find astronomer to be too small a title for Sagan however.  I might rather say astronomer-philosopher-scientist-existentialist-atheist-therapist-dreamer, among many other admirable qualities and accomplishments.

The beginning credits start. A soft chorus of strings and a piano accompany the beginning of your voyage through an array of interstellar dust and clouds.  I know what you're thinking. Are we in some hokey new-age relaxation film?  I assure you that you are not. Sagan is a rigorous believer in the scientific method. He dispels all validity of astrology and alien abduction.  As a bonus, Sagan is an incredibly talented at the art of elocution. I could get lost in the cadences of his voice -- the extended vowels and the reassuring hand gestures. 

Each episode is done on the grandest scale imaginable: "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean," "Voice in the Cosmic Fugue," and "Harmony of the Worlds," are some of the chapters that mark this epic journey.  It's this grandiosity that might turn some people off at first, but if you give Sagan a chance you realize that this scale is our scale. It is the scale of the universe of which we are a part of. Take, for example, this photograph taken of the earth from one of the distance shores of our galaxy.

Sagan famously refers to Earth here as the "pale blue dot." He points out that "all of human history has happened on that tiny pixel (shown here inside a blue circle), which is our only home."It is an incredibly humbling realization that all of human existence is only a pale blue dot in comparison to the vastness of the cosmos.

However, the most astonishing realization Sagan made for me in Cosmos, was the realization that we are the universe reflecting upon itself.  We rose out of interstellar gasses and evolved over billions of years and have come to reflect upon our place among the galaxies. And after this realization I had the most peaceful sense of calm, as if I finally knew my place in the world, as if for the past twenty two years my perspective had been completely out of whack.

So if you are drowning in the seeming chaos of post-grad or expat existence, I would recommend looking to the organization and perspective that Cosmos gives as a much simpler and cheaper form of therapy.  Yes, many of the series' preoccupations are outmoded and come from a time when relations between the Soviet Union and America were quite different.  As any film it is an artifact of its time. But to me Cosmos still offers perspective in the midst of chaos. Just keep looking up.