You’ve probably done this, if you’ve used binoculars. You turned them around and looked through them “the wrong way.” And just like that, things you looked at were tiny and far away. Turn the binoculars around again and the faraway things come back up close.  

It’s a demonstration of basic optics. The lenses gather light and create magnification. 10X or a magnification power of 10, makes an object appear 10 times closer than it would appear to the naked eye. So, something 100 yards away will appear to be only 10 yards away.

Reversing the binoculars and the lenses’ effect diminishes magnification to 0.1, meaning that now an object 10 yards away appears to be 100 yards away. Big difference.

And clearly, there’s a much bigger difference in how things appear when they are magnified 10 times as opposed to reduced 10 times. That’s from a few steps away, to ten football fields.   

Recently, a few minutes on Twitter / X duplicated this binocular trick for me. Through the “lenses” of social media, what I saw was hope.  

I watched a video of a poignant conversation between the four astronauts packed into roughly 300 cubic feet aboard the Orion Integrity. As the spacecraft passed by the moon, three members of the crew proposed naming one of the moon’s craters “Carroll” after the fourth member’s late wife. It was a candid, teary-eyed moment for the four humans 250,000 miles from Earth, and for everyone here on the planet watching like I was.  We were looking at hope, right in front of us.

The next video queued to play was the epitome of incongruity. “Brawl aboard a bus,” the caption read, and although I clicked away as quickly as I could, that’s exactly what was happening.  This group of humans, forced into close proximity to one another, were showcasing their very worst behavior for all viewers.  Hope suddenly looked far off.

The huge disparity in the two videos I saw gave me a lot of perspective.  

If there’s a lesson to share, I think it is this:  

Use your “binoculars” to view the world and our fellow humans with wide-eyed wonder. Bring them close, keep them close. Don’t use those binoculars to bonk someone over the head.  

If enough of us can share that view, then I think that maybe hope is closer than it appears.

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