For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

by Sasha Sagan

In a footnote to the book Pale Blue Dot, my dad describes the events of March 4, 1953 BCE, when the five planets visible to the naked eye aligned perfectly, “strung out like jewels on a necklace near the great square in the constellation Pegasus.”

How ordinary they seemed to me then, and how sacred they seem now. How sorry I am I didn’t cherish every minute, every tiny detail, conversation, inside joke, and quiet moment. But that’s the thing about death—it makes you appreciate life. It’s almost impossible to appreciate something without facing its absence.

By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness; in reality there are atoms and space. —DEMOCRITUS

These gateways into adulthood get dressed up differently by societal norms and cultures, but deep down each one is about the release of gonadotropin into the pituitary gland, about estrogen and testosterone, and the new possibilities of sex, pregnancy, parenthood, and responsibility. That is what we’re really celebrating at every quinceañera and bar mitzvah, every Roman Catholic confirmation, every cotillion, every debutante ball, every sweet sixteen. This is about biology, sexual maturity, and the survival of the species.

He couldn’t understand why this old book, the Bible, was so much more important than all the others.

Years later, he told me that when he pictured God in his mind’s eye as a child, he imagined “Santa Claus without the suit.” As he got older, the personification and behavioral decrees fell away. Slowly, God became a word for the way the universe works, something like Einstein’s God of Spinoza. By college he called this physics. He had no epiphany, no rebellion, no crisis of faith. His belief faded as he learned more. For him, the true ritual transition to manhood wasn’t giving the speech before the class but being allowed to decide what he really believed.

I thought I had permanently lost a kind of joie de vivre that would never return, that from now on, whenever something good happened there would be a nagging voice saying, “Yeah, sure, it’s great you got an A, but the sun is going to implode, so . . .” I thought I had unleashed a kind of eternal buzzkill, something I’d never be able to put back in the bottle, ruining every future pleasure.

I already knew that just being alive at all is astonishing and beautiful, but I don’t know if I had ever really felt it fully before. I started telling myself that no matter what tomorrow brought, each little moment on Earth was still meaningful. And that if life went on forever it would not be as precious. I started reminding myself that even though I will certainly die someday, I am alive right now, which is an incredibly lucky thing.

i’m not crying you are

Slowly, this idea started to bring me a kind of giddy joy, almost like butterflies in my stomach. It took a while, but eventually I was happier than I had been before the trip. And I was happy because of a deep understanding of the finite nature of life, not in spite of it. This, to me, felt like adulthood. I don’t believe ignorance is bliss. I think understanding is bliss, but, to get to the joyful part, sometimes you have to face the terror head-on. Once I could admit to myself how truly tiny we are, how short our time is, and still love life, I felt like a woman.

The ultraviolet radiation we get from the sun releases endorphins in our brains. It’s a real chemical reaction, a scientific connection between our bodies and our closest star. How beautiful is that? How astonishing that being bathed in rays of light from a 4.6-billion-year-old mass of hydrogen and helium located 93 million miles away can make us feel happy?

Some of the stars we can see at night are already dead. Starlight is a kind of time travel. A vision of the past.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

When I was little he told me that air particles stay in our atmosphere for such a long time that we breathe the same air as the people who lived thousands of years ago. I think about that often now. I can take a deep breath and know that some fraction of those particles were once breathed by my dad. What an intimate thing it is to breathe the air of someone you loved.

And so it seems to me that part of the duty of citizenship is not to be intimidated into conformity, to be skeptical. I wish that the oath of citizenship that you are about to take in the next few minutes included something like, “I promise to question everything my leaders tell me.” That would really be Jeffersonian. “I promise to use my critical faculties. I promise to develop my independence of thought. I promise to educate myself so I can make independent judgments.” And if these statements are not part of the oath, you can nevertheless make such promises. And such promises, it seems to me, would be a gift that you can make your country.

Questioning something, exploring it, examining it, thinking of ways it might change for the better is a way of loving something.

I love this tradition because it feels like a miniature version of dead stars that appear to twinkle even after they’re long gone.

Somehow we humans got the idea that the best moment to really meditate on an event—a birth, a marriage, a death, a battle, a coronation, an inauguration, anything good, terrible, romantic, auspicious, historic, or otherwise memorable—is when the Earth is back in the same position it was when the thing happened. This is astronomy at work.

“significance junkie.”

I strive to just enjoy that magical moment we all experience when, say, you’re thinking of an old friend and they suddenly call. The urge to see a pattern is strong, even biological, but I also find pleasure in the idea of a world of total accidents. If these coincidences are orchestrated by some supernatural force larger than the human brain, well, then they were inevitable. But if it’s truly random, if it’s the one-in-a-million shot that lands, that is, to me, more special.

Call it what you will—Happiness! Heart! Love! God! I have no name to give it! Feeling is everything, name is but sound and smoke . . . —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, Faust

Twelve thousand lights. Constantly changing, enormous and awe-inspiring, creating patterns that evoked the depths of space. The artist Leo Villareal had created it and called it Cosmos as an homage to my dad’s work and the grandeur of what he called “all that is, ever was, or will ever be.”

Love is the call back to our original form. Love heals the wound of human nature.

Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine, fertility, and frenzied, wild parties, whose cult honored him by achieving ecstasy through dance.

“This woman now belongs to this man.” We have adapted it to mean something more like “Here are two equals who choose to be together, to make each other happier, better, less alone.”

Folks, I’m telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean— so get yourself a little loving in between. —LANGSTON HUGHES