The Most Important Thing I Know

Life is funny. Most of the time we think we have it figured out. Then a seemingly random event will strike as if to puncture the thin veneer of understanding - and this might be a positive of negative experience. A lot of the time we reflexively ignore these opportunities and do our best to stay whatever course we are pursuing, even if it’s detrimental to us and those around us.

People are creatures of habit. We keep to the same paths like either deep-space research probes or obsolete communication satellites. If our trajectory is upward and outward, we keep moving forward and looking for what’s new. If we’re in orbit around some massive body, like a planet or an adverse childhood event, we remain in a deteriorating orbit, eventually to be shredded in the atmosphere as our pieces flare against the night’s sky. A probe in space might continue to send back new information and insights much longer than it was originally designed to do. As we know, that’s often a solitary journey.

But someday, when our great, great-grandchildren or the next intelligent life we manage to spawn on Earth gets out there, they’ll pass up those probes and take note, perhaps even honor the ingenuity. Maybe some secular, android priest will chant a long string ones and zeroes in reverence to the strides that their human ancestors made hundreds of years before. Or maybe the long-dormant Mars rovers will spawn tourist traps with quick-charge stations and tacky souvenirs.

Nobody will reflect on the forest that grew up where once artificial shooting stars made by satellites found their final resting places. Nobody will shudder in awe that they once carried the signals amounting to Wordle posts on social media.

This is the most important thing I know. It’s not better to burn out than fade away. It’s better to endure, to voyage, and to be curious. It’s better to stay free of gravitation. The decommissioned Hubble Telescope for all its greatness, unless we bring it home and put it in a museum, will in a decade or two be nothing but a high-pitched feedback whine before someone taps the mic and clears the signal.

Our habits often mirror these scenarios until we are acted on by an outside force. It could be that a deep-space probe or a satellite gets smashed by space junk. Not long ago, the International Space Station was at risk of collision with debris created by a Russian anti-satellite test. Sometimes less malicious things interfere in our status quo to shake us up, like some long-progressing realization that crystallizes one random morning and launches us off with a new vector.

Slow forces can bring us down or they can act as a catalyst. Collision with new information can take us on an unexpected enterprise. Where we find ourselves on any given day, though, is not strictly circumstantial. We can choose to orbit the past and face eventual, ambiguous ends or propel ourselves into the lonely unknown - in one case we know exactly what we will find.

It’s up to us to decide which course is ours.