Perspective

Avid readers will recall back in early April I had already started going mad from lockdown – oh hindsight you are a beautiful thing; how sane I once was. We are now nearly a month on from that and the national mood seems to be one of rather low moral: understandable, of course, and there’s only so much football manager the nation can play before even that becomes laborious.

Indeed, lockdown malaise has well and truly kicked in and it can all feel incredibly overwhelming: an extremely macabre reminder of the fragility of our species. It is this theme that I want to touch on today, not the depressing self-defeat of it all, but a reminder of our precious space in the cosmos and just how humbling this can be when truly put into perspective.

Before politics was any sort of carer trajectory of mine, I was set on becoming a physicist (which probably gives further bearing and credence to why my parents think me so strange). Certainly, the heavens are something I often find myself turning to in times of self-doubt and self-defeat, recalling the pale blue dot speech given by Carl Sagan where he so perfectly articulated our position in the cosmos as no more than ‘a mode of dust suspended in a sun beam’.

What are we to make of this? Is this a means to Nihilism? A means to excusing not caring about something so apparently small? I think not. People often look up and feel small; feel insignificant, but this, I believe, is to neglect the miracle of being here in the first place. What a stunning and implausible coincidence that we should wind up here, on a comfortable planet as conscious beings with the great beyond at our fingertips. We are giants in sitcom Earth with the privilege of experience: love, joy, anger, hurt, truly we are blessed and lucky to even feel these at all: what an auspicious existence.

We will overcome, and when we do let us model our tiny world in to something that all can appreciate and cherish as much as Carl Sagan wanted us to – we are the custodians of life’s meaning, if we crave some cosmic purpose then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.