On days like this..

May I offer some Cosmic Therapy on this depressing Wednesday?

Writing this helped me process today. Thank you for reading!

Staring at the sky, come back and pick me up! // Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

Oh, what a day. Hi.

I spent my morning drowning in flashbacks of 2016, remembering how scared, incredulous, and overwhelmed I felt when he won the first time. I was just 33—recently married, in grad school, starting my teaching career. I was not yet a mom and I badly wanted to be. I cried big, fat tears to my husband that night after hosting the world’s most depressing election night party in literal history, saying how we could never have kids now that he was president.

I really meant it; life felt so scary, so uncertain. There was just no way.

I was honestly surprised the sun rose the next day.

We thankfully did have a kid, now two— our first was born in January 2018. He’s almost seven now, and yesterday, he came with me to vote. He was so happy, curious, and cute, just thrilled to be in a middle school gym with big-kid basketball hoops and a squeaky floor. The poll worker gave us a second “Future Voter” sticker for his baby brother back home. The sun was shining. It was a really nice day.

Today, though, I just feel so sad. Sad for him, for his little brother, for my students—for all kids, really. I’m so sad that they are growing up in this divisive, angry time, with such a divisive, crude man in power and in the spotlight—never mind the policies he’ll usher in. I’m so sad that the chaos continues. It’s going to be a bumpy few years, to say the least.

At some point this morning, Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” quote came to mind and it helped me release some of the pressure and intensity of the day. I come back to the concept often, like it’s a big hit of cosmic perspective therapy.

Here it is, edited down a bit, just in case it helps you, too—

Look again at 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.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

I am always in favor of taking us humans down a peg. I think it helps to remember just how small and insignificant we are—he is—it all is. We’re all literally just a bunch of animals (~ ordinary animals ~) trying to exist together on a random rock floating in space. It really makes no sense when you think about it, especially from a cosmic view, and yet, here we are.

That doesn’t mean suffering and hardship are not real, but it pays to be thankful for the vastness of time and space today, to remember that our planet and our time spent on it is just one small, tiny part of a 13.8 billion-year-old universe. In that light, any one individual leader’s term in office is a laughably small part of a much longer story. I know political events can feel overwhelming, but humanity has endured many challenges. Cycles of progress and setbacks have always been part of the journey.

As for me, no matter the larger political landscape, I’ll keep doing the good, small things in my own corner of the world—teaching my boys and all the kiddos I work with to be kind, open-minded, and resilient. To find fun, and joy, and humor in their days. Hopefully that work ripples out in beautiful ways I’ll never even know or see. Perhaps, in each of our own little ways, we can continue to make our dot a bit brighter for them.

Xx Danielle 🧡