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To call the scale of space overwhelming is to commit criminal understatement: space is overwhelming in the sense that a human sacrifice splayed on the altar while the moon eclipses the sun and the chanting priest raises the knife is having a bad Tuesday.
What you cannot break, you do not own.
People liked to talk about decisions as simple matters of pro and con, column A and column B, but Viv had never seen it that way. You learned everything you could about a problem; you held it all in your mind at once as pressure built, and built, until at last you broke, and acted. When the moment came, no matter how long you’d pondered or what pains you’d taken, the right words slipped from you as easy as a splinter working its way free.
Was this what they called growing up? She’d thought that meant maturity, weathering, endurance. But instead you gathered one terror after another to yourself, until you were a skin-clad skeleton cradling a self made up of wounds.
she could see him telling himself the story he always told, that this moment should have no more meaning than any other, that the world was always changing and any claim of significance for changes in which one participated was just a failure of perspective. Telling himself, and believing it, and living it, and scared anyway.
When afraid: live.
We have all done so much, and there is so much more to do. But the fight for a world where all of us can enjoy lives of freedom, exploration, hospitality, and encounter is not new, and none of us are alone in it. I hope this book has given you some strength. Find allies. Take care of yourselves. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.
