To Be Taught, If Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

I’m an observer, not a conqueror. I have no interest in changing other worlds to suit me. I choose the lighter touch: changing myself to suit them.

At some point, you have to accept the fact that any movement creates waves, and the only other option is to lie still and learn nothing.

When standing on one of these quieter worlds, you know that the entire sphere, in every direction, is wilderness.

The thing about the important stuff is, it’s never uplifting.

A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox – the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death.

But my generation was so preoccupied with fixing the mess left by the unaddressed-and-fully-known-about environmental disaster of the previous generation that we committed the same sin of criminal procrastination against yours.

a home can only exist in a moment. Something both found and made. Always temporary, in the grand scheme of things, but vital all the same.

We have found nothing you can sell. We have found nothing you can put to practical use. We have found no worlds that could be easily or ethically settled, were that end desired. We have satisfied nothing but curiosity, gained nothing but knowledge.