Wake up, Wake up
At Starbucks this morning just after six AM the horizon to the East was glowing. To the West just above the tree line in the distance, was a big orange pumpkin moon. It is rare that I have a cosmic sense that everything is in motion. Yes, everything.
We fear stasis. Stasis is a condition of being frozen, locked in place, the cessation of life. Nothing moves. There is nothing of interest to note, nothing of observational value. Nothing to appreciate. The color is drained from everything. The party’s over. Only the trash remains.
Yes, I felt in a funk this morning. The arriving sun, and the departing moon helped to shake me awake. I also found inspiration in Maria Popova’s Brainpickings email newsletter that I received upon turning on my laptop Here is a segment of what she had to offer….
When the Voyager 1 spacecraft turned its camera back on the Solar System for one last look after taking its pioneering photographs of our planetary neighborhood, it captured a now-iconic image of Earth — a tiny pixel in a tiny slice of an incomprehensibly vast universe. The photograph was christened the “Pale Blue Dot” thanks to Carl Sagan, who immortalized the moment in his timeless monologue on our place in the cosmos:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Forty years after the Voyager sailed into space, we seem to have lost sight of this beautiful and sobering perspective, drifting further and further into our divides, fragmenting our fragile home pixel into more and more warring factions, and forgetting that we are bound together by the improbable miracle of life on this Pale Blue Dot and a shared cosmic destiny.
In order to subscribe to Popova’s fine newsletter CLICK HERE
