WHY WE SHOULD LOOK AT THE STARS — GIVING PROBLEMS SOME PERSPECTIVE

When was the last time you stood still for more than a minute and looked up at the night sky for no particular reason?

Not to take a picture or check whether it was about to rain. Just to look — and spend a while taking in that vast expanse of stars.

If your answer is “I can’t remember,” you are not alone. And perhaps that says something important about the way you have been living, and even about how you have been feeling.

Looking at the stars is one of the few human activities that still requires us to stop, tilt our heads back, and do nothing but look. In a life ruled by screens, targets, and the constant sense that we are running late for something, such a simple act has become almost a luxury.

That is precisely why it is worth asking why it matters — not merely as a poetic gesture, but as something closely connected to what is discussed every day in a psychiatrist’s office or during a psychotherapy session.

The first thing looking at the sky can do is bring us back to the present.

As we stand there, heads tilted back and eyes open to the darkness scattered with points of light, the mind finds a rare counterweight to rumination about painful things that have already happened and anxious anticipation of what might happen next.

Caught between “What if I had done things differently?” and “What if it all goes wrong?”, the mind is invited simply to be — without trying to rewrite the past or predict the future.

Perhaps that is the most immediate effect. It is not that our problems disappear. For a few minutes, they simply lose the microphone.

Then something else happens, and it may be even more interesting.

If we keep looking, things begin to change in size.

A problem we have carried for years — one that seems too large to solve and too painful to accept — may begin to seem, when set against the scale of an entire galaxy, small. And I use that word carefully.

Not trivial. Not unimportant. Simply small, like a single point of light against the immensity surrounding it.

This does not mean giving up on the problem or treating it as normal or acceptable. It means becoming able to observe it from enough of a distance to place it in perspective, rather than seeing it only from the inside, where it fills our entire field of vision and seems to be the only thing happening in our lives.

That is often what happens when we have been immersed in the same difficulty for so long that we can no longer imagine ever being free of it.

There is a subtle but powerful distinction hidden within this change of scale: it separates who we are from the situation in which we find ourselves.

We carry pain, anxiety, a diagnosis, or a difficult history — and over time, we may begin to believe that this is all we are. That we are the problem.

Yet we are not the problem. We are people going through a problem.

I strongly believe that the difference between those two statements can, in itself, profoundly alter the course of treatment.

There is also a third layer, perhaps the quietest of all.

When we look at the stars, we are quite literally looking into the unknown: at something we cannot fully name, map, or predict. And although the unknown can be frightening, it can also bring an unexpected sense of freedom.

A great deal of human suffering comes from trying to solve new problems with old solutions: the same strategies that have already failed, or that may once have worked but no longer fit the lives we are living now.

When we face a difficulty, it is natural to search for answers within the repertoire we already possess. But once that repertoire has been exhausted, we may keep repeating the same attempts indefinitely — banging our heads against the same wall without realising that different problems may require entirely different ways of responding.

Looking towards what is not yet clear — towards the sky, towards what we still do not know about ourselves, towards a solution we have not yet invented — is an exercise in making room for something new, rather than blindly repeating what no longer works.

Perhaps that is also why looking upwards carries so much meaning.

In Portuguese, we have a particularly vivid expression for the opposite movement: olhar para o próprio umbigo — literally, “to stare at one’s own navel.” It describes becoming so absorbed in our own immediate concerns that we lose sight of everything around us.

When we are suffering, our field of vision naturally tends to narrow. The problem closest to us takes over our attention, and there seems to be little room for anything else.

Looking at the stars is the opposite. It widens our field of vision. It reminds us that there is an “above,” an “around,” and a “beyond” — and that these directions continue to exist even when life has convinced us that there is nothing apart from what stands immediately in front of us.

There is, of course, a trap in this idea, and it is worth addressing.

Looking at the stars does not mean achieving some transcendent detachment from everything, nor does it mean minimising genuine suffering by saying that “nothing matters because, in the grand scheme of things, we are insignificant.”

It means something more modest and perhaps more useful: placing our suffering alongside something larger.

Not to erase it, but to stop it from being the only thing we can see.

It means restoring the relationship between figure and background. The problem is real, but so is the wider context behind it — a context that is larger, richer in possibilities, and equally deserving of a place in the stories we tell about our lives.

Putting pain into perspective does not mean dismissing it. It means preventing it from making the entire rest of the world — and the rest of our lives — seem unimportant.

We do not need to travel anywhere special to do this. We do not need to see the Milky Way from some remote place untouched by city lights, although that would certainly help.

It might be no more than thirty seconds between getting out of the car and reaching the front door, before turning the key and stepping inside at the end of another ordinary day.

It means looking at what surrounds us instead of only at our phones, without feeling compelled to reach a conclusion and without rushing to turn the experience into yet another item to tick off our to-do list.

Just remembering that above our heads lies an immense and still largely unknown expanse — one that science continues to explore, and whose vastness may be every bit as astonishing as the mind contemplating it.

We should look at the stars not to find answers up there, but to remember that an infinity of questions and possibilities still exists.

In here.

And that, contrary to what anxiety, depression, and fear keep trying to make us believe, may be very good news.

Image credit: AI-generated from a prompt written by the author.