“What do I want for you? I want you to look up and be amazed. I want you to feel supported, less lonely and afraid, a part of rather than apart from. I want you to ask that question you have been wanting to ask, and let go of worrying whether someone already asked it while you were daydreaming, or whether someone will think it’s stupid or impossible to answer. I want you to know, but not just know, feel, deep down in your belly, that who you are is magnificent. I want you not to merely tolerate, but to celebrate your many contradictions, and embrace the full, complex being that you are. When you look up at the sky, clear or not, don’t you know that there are hundreds of billions of stars looking back at you? You are on a planet rotating on its axis at a thousand miles an hour and hurtling through space around its Sun at nearly seventy thousand miles per hour, as the Sun rotates around the center of our Milky Way galaxy at over four hundred thousand miles per hour, while the galaxy moves through space at more than one million miles per hour. And this same thing is happening on hundreds of billions of planets orbiting hundreds of billions of stars moving in hundreds of billions of other galaxies elsewhere in the universe. So much is happening right at this very moment, as you breathe this breath. This needn’t make you afraid. What it can do, if you let it, is make you simultaneously humble and expansive. There is so much beyond your own individual struggles.”
―
Aomawa Shields,
Life on Other Planets: A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe
