I recently read this ESPN piece about Suni Williams, one of the astronauts still aboard the ISS and it made me think and feel. I guess I can add another 'easy' thing to be grateful for: "I'm not stuck in a metal tube the size of a football field for 8 months." That one should be as retrievable as "I'm not paralyzed--I can walk" and "I get to work from home today." This astronaut's experience is undoubtedly unfathomable to me, an ordinary person who has never experienced space—just as unfathomable as life's transformation upon having children, or going to war. There are one-way experiential doors in this life, and it's impossible to fully understand what's on the other side of those doors without crossing through. Visiting space, and more-so being stuck there unexpectedly, is one of those doorways.

Time, mortality, meaning and purpose

I wrote a bucket list of sorts back in January upon Chris Guillebeau's urging. "Go to space" was one of the long-shot things I wrote down. It's supposed to transcend our imagination—the weightlessness, the visuals of the Earth from above, the recognition of home. I wrote a short story about this back in August. The thought of being in space has always captivated me. In fact, the very first real story I ever wrote back was about space, back when I was in 2nd grade. It was full of space battles with aliens in the far-off future, featuring all kinds of cool vehicles like "Cyber Motorcycles." (I remember being so proud that I had "written 14 pages.") For almost 37 years I've thought about space. The ESPN piece only deepened my wonder.

How ironic would it be if experiencing the wonder of space is what enables us to see the wonder of our world. Astronauts have famously described the overview effect, yet less than 700 people have had the chance to experience it. Physically removing ourselves from the oneness of Earth seemingly strengthens our understanding of its necessity, our connection to our home. When you see pictures of the Earth from space, you automatically see the big picture, understanding, even if just for a moment, how minuscule we are within just our solar system.

In the ESPN article Oliver Burkeman comments:

"Culturally, we tend to have this definition of doing something meaningful that implies affecting a large number of people, or being remembered for years and years and years. And that's a really quite cruel ... definition of meaning to put on ourselves, because it almost means that, by definition, most of us can't have meaningful lives, right? Cause most of us can't be the most famous person in a generation, and most of us can't make the most important invention of the generation, or whatever. And so I think ... maybe what we're really looking for is just a feeling of being alive rather than a meaning ... That's the thing that we can navigate by, instead of this kind of very grandiose idea of, 'Is civilization going to be grateful to me a millennium from now?'"

How can we find meaning when we recognize how apparently insignificant we are?

It's a hard question to answer, but I have some thoughts. I think we're simply here to live. Life happened on our planet, and it evolved to the point we're at now—monkeys primitively exploring beyond our planet's atmosphere. That's us. Perhaps there's no rhyme or reason for our existence beyond the fact that we just are. We're alive, and so our purpose is to live, wholly and wildly and freely. I also have some intuitive inkling that I've started to fulfill one of my purposes: I have created offspring. My wife and I have created a child, and she will go on, god willing, to live a long full life. It's not really about me, it's about passing on the flame of consciousness, the chance to experience, to simply "the next." I love my daughter so completely, something about this resonates deeply with me, and it feels right in my bones. In some ways, my purpose was just to create and raise her.

We get so caught up in our day to day lives, the results of last quarter and the traffic and the outrageous things our politicians say, that we forget this big picture. It's easily obscured, because it's not loud and flamboyant. It's the quiet truth that so easily gets crowded out by the noisy world society has created. But our meaning and purpose is inescapable. It can never be lost or destroyed. We exist, and if we revert back to the big picture, there remains our purpose. Space helps us see it clearly.