Short of breath, sweat, grimace, hope, forgot to breathe again, curse at the tv, sweat some more, sip, oh yeah… breathe again. This was basically my night on Tuesday night while watching the election results. Getting all wrapped up into the anxiety machine. The “what ifs” exploding into a mushroom cloud of angst. “Oh deary me! Clutch the pearls! I think I have the vapors!” (All said in my best lilting southern accent).
This election and the repercussions of it appear so barbed and burdensome. Everything seems so “close up” right now. All the jagged pointy bits of life, all so very immediate and permanent. Where’s the balance? There must be something out there that is the relative opposite of all this dire emotional spaghetti. I think we’ve all been drawn into this election closer than anyone ever has been. The world has become very small due to a huge planet wide pandemic and, no, the irony of that statement is far from lost on me. The most minuscule moments in our existence have become titanic. Myopia is running rampant. Maybe we need to pull back for a second and see the whole show.
If the earth were shrunk down to the scale of a marble it would be smooth to the touch, a perfect sphere. From Mount Everest in the Himalayas to the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean… smooth like glass. This place is freaking huge. Sometimes we forget that we’re astronauts on a giant rock hurling through infinite space surrounded by an invisible, magical protective life bubble so we can breath without a space suit.
This too shall pass and we will keep flying into the unknown. It’s our destiny as astronauts. It’s a big blue marble. Take a look at a picture of the planet earth taken from space and be in awe of the fortune you’ve been gifted. We are a blip in a fragment of this thing called Life. The sun will rise tomorrow regardless of who’s in Air Force 1. My dog’s still gonna need to be fed and the dishes will still need to be washed. We go on. We are resilient and adaptable beyond our comprehension. We got this. There’s other galaxies to be explored.
