Jim Lovell commanded Apollo 13. He’s the one who said the famous line —not the movie version one “Houston, we have a problem,”— but something he said elsewhere, about the way he sees human beings.
There are three kinds of people in the world, Lovell said. Those who make things happen. Those who watch things happen. And those who wonder what happened.
Machiavelli, writing in the early 16th century, said the same thing a little differently.
There are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others. The first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.
The first is excellent. The second is good. The third is useless.
Machiavelli was not a man who softened his assessments.
What Marcus Adds
Marcus Aurelius didn’t need a spacecraft or a Renaissance court to arrive at the same observation. In Meditation III.10 he writes:
Short is the time which every man lives, and small the nook of the earth where he lives, and short too the longest posthumous fame, and even this only continued by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die, and who know not even themselves, much less him who died long ago.
Jim Lovell floated in a damaged spacecraft a quarter of a million miles from earth and covered the entire planet with his thumb. He saw the smallness from space.
Marcus saw it from a battlefield in 170 AD. Writing to himself at night by lamplight.
He didn’t need a spacecraft. He needed a clear enough mind to think thoughts all the way through.
Which Kind Are You?
The question Lovell and Machiavelli are both asking — and Marcus is implicitly asking every time he writes about the smallness of life and the shortness of time — is not rhetorical. It has an answer. And most people, if they’re honest, know what their answer is.
Making things happen requires initiative — the willingness to act before you’re certain, before permission is granted, before it’s comfortable. Beowulf sailed across the sea to fight a monster without being asked. Marcus Aurelius got up every morning in a military camp and wrote himself instructions for how to be a better human being at night, knowing he might not survive the next day.
Watching things happen is respectable. The second class of intellect — the one that comprehends when shown — is good, Machiavelli says. These people respond well, learn well, can be counted on when given direction. Not everyone is built to act without a map.
The third category is the one none of us want to admit belonging to. Wondering what happened. Moving through events without comprehending them, without extracting meaning, without changing as a result. Without asking why. Present in the room but absent from what the room is doing. Observers, not participants.
There is a case to be made that as an observer, you change things just by “being there.” That’s an Eistein thing, and it brings together all three of those thoughts: make, watch, wonder. People have the potential for all three, actually, but for whatever reason – habit, circumstance – people fall into one of the categories and forget they have possibilities for being all three.
Smallness as the Tell
There’s a reason Marcus keeps returning to the smallness of human life in the Meditations. It’s not morbid. It’s clarifying. It’s the tell – the behavior, gesture, or verbal cue in the case of Marcus that reveals a person’s hidden thoughts, emotions, or intentions.
Because if your life is short and your nook of the earth is small, then the question of what you do with the time becomes urgent. Not in a panicked way. In a focused way. The shortness is the argument for choosing between what three possibilities of what a person can be. For being in the first category, or honestly accepting the second, or — if you’re in the third — deciding whether you want, when you want, what you want.
Lovell covered the earth with his thumb. Marcus covered it with thought. The view from both places is the same.
What you do with that view is the only question that matters.
Read the Meditations with Jimmy at readingwithjimmy.com. Questions and reactions to [email protected].