Inaugural Post!

Welcome!

When 2015 rolled around, I made it a goal to get more into my writing. People who have known me for a while know that writing is one of my biggest hobbies. Unfortunately, I'm notoriously bad at sharing anything that I do.

I want this to be a space for sharing the stuff that usually gets locked up in a notebook: fiction and thoughts that I'm exploring.

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I started today moseying around the house while listening to Chris Hadfield, a commander of the International Space Station, talk about his new book. (https://libwww.freelibrary.org/podcast/?podcastID=1353) He combines all the excitement and charisma of Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, with the matter-of-factness of a long time engineer. Give it a listen, it is very inspiring. Later, I met up with some friends and we watched an IMAX documentary about a mission to fix the Hubble Telescope back in 2009. I left the show completely overwhelmed. I had been reminded of my place in the universe.

Space is vast and dangerous. Our bodies were only developed to function on Earth, and only in certain environments. But our mind can transcend most of our physical limitations. We are constantly working to understand the world around us. We seek to understand our bodies, our brains. We send explorers out to the far reaches of our environment. That used to mean far away islands or the depths of our oceans. Now we select a few members of our species, attach them to millions of pounds of explosives, shoot them above our atmosphere out into the vastness that encompasses our planet.

Our brains were developed for the physical landscape that surrounds us, but our surroundings are very different from most of what exists in the universe. We float in space, huge empty swathes of it, punctuated by elemental clouds and giant chemical reactors that we call stars. Theories of physics that work out just fine in our immediate surroundings begin to crumble in the face of the universe.

I left that theater standing firmer in my social beliefs. We spend so much of our lives tangled in petty disputes and small hatreds. Our lives are short compared to what surrounds us. There was a time our individual consciousness did not exist and we all know that there will be a time when our consciousness ends. Because of centuries of work from thousands of human beings we are able to glimpse light that has travelled billions of years and miles to our planet. We can look through a lens and see worlds that we cannot travel to in our lifetimes.

Where does bigotry fit into that?

We place so much value in profit, in individual wealth, and not in the betterment of our species as a whole. The individuals who participate in companies that have put us on the moon also participate in social injustices and the degradation of the environment that we all share.

I walked out of the museum more committed to carrying out work to make us more equal. We're all on this rock, hurtling through a universe that we are only just beginning to understand. Many of us don't have enough water, many of us don't have enough food, many of us fear cultural persecution. We are the only humans that exist. We inhabit one small corner of the universe. We should be lifting each other up. We should be celebrating our mutual humanity, not separating one another into arbitrary camps of the worthy and unworthy.

We can't always see it, but this is our real backyard.