The Sunday Letter #33: Welcome to (Anxious) Spaceship Earth

I woke up at roughly 4am this morning, doubled over with anxiety. Anxiety about money, anxiety about work, anxiety about community, anxiety about this new book, anxiety about, well, everything. I tried to breathe through it and for a few minutes that seemed to work and then the anxiety bubbled up all over again and whatever ground I’d gained fell away.

I opened up my phone and went back to this post that I wrote just a few days shy of two months ago, and for a few minutes that seemed to work too.

You knew what you were doing, I told myself. You knew what you were doing; you made the right decision then. You’re making the right decision now. Everything will be okay.

Eventually, somehow, I went back to sleep for a bit. I woke up a couple of hours later, and the anxiety was right there all over again, thrumming in my stomach. I got up and took the dog for our morning walk and then I busied myself with household tasks (I joined the TikTok stripping-your-laundry train! Four years late, as usual!¹), and then my sister asked if I wanted to take a drive to our other sister’s house and lounge in her pool for a while, and I said yes. We went and swam and talked and it was wonderful.

Now I am back, filled with sun and fatigue and that glow that comes from swimming². And the anxiety has quieted down somewhat but it’s still here. I am trying to make space for it, trying to be as gentle as I can.

It’s hard. But then, sometimes that’s just what life is, isn’t it.

Photo by Ian Chen on Unsplash

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I am not one of those people who secretly or overtly yearns to go to space. I never dreamed of becoming an astronaut; I’ve never dreamed of going to Mars. Eleven years ago, when Mars One (remember them?) put out their call for people to volunteer for that first one-way trip to Mars (supposed to have taken place in 2023! Look how far we have come…and not!), I remember talking to a friend who had signed up for the mission with her partner. Both of them were extremely excited for the opportunity and were ready to go at the drop of a hat. I remember feeling so baffled.

But—life on Mars isn’t going to be that great, I thought but didn’t say. Don’t you think you’ll get tired of never being able to go outside without a spacesuit on? Won’t you miss the sun? The trees? EVERYTHING?

I am fine right here—I’ve always been fine right here. Going to space doesn’t appeal, even for the novelty of it. Going on a one-way trip to Mars especially doesn’t appeal. Getting to experience zero gravity would be fun, I’ll admit, but that’s about as far as my thinking goes.

That said, I’ve been thinking a lot over these last few weeks about what it must be like to be in space. Several months ago I watched The Overview Effect, a short film that interviews people who’ve gone to space, and I was struck by how they all talk about how seeing Earth from space really does give you a different perspective on life. All of the worries that consume you on Earth hit different, you might say, when you view them all—us all—from way up there.

I imagine you’d have to be very present, up there in space. On the ISS, in the shuttles, everywhere. Always paying attention to what needs to be done in order to keep things going, paying attention to angles and computers and whatnot when you’re coming back down—everything paying attention to everything else, constantly.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that the anxiety of being up in space probably brushes up against the wonder of being in space all the time. I imagine they go hand-in-hand.

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In their latest Substack newsletter, Colorado Poet Laureate andrea gibson waxes beautifully, and so poetically as only they can do, about wonder. Did you know that raindrops fall so slowly on Titan, one of Saturn’s many moons? I did not. Methane rains down as liquid on Titan, and the drops are almost a centimetre across. Because Titan is so much smaller than earth, the gravitational pull of the moon is much less, and this, combined with the moon’s thicker atmosphere, means that those methane raindrops fall as gently as snowflakes. You could, as andrea notes, see a raindrop coming and move out of the way before it hit you.

When I am in my most anxious moments, like now, I try to breathe and force myself to notice the world in front of my face—the way you’d notice raindrops if you were on Titan, the way you’d notice the Earth if you were wheeling above it in the ISS. Today this meant noticing the feel of the sun on my skin as I sprawled on my sister’s deck, and the loose feeling of sun-in-my-bones after I came home. (Side note: why does laying in the sun tire us out so much? Why?)

It means noticing the anxiety as it thrums in my stomach and trying to understand what it’s bubbling to tell me.

Everything is going to fall apart. You’re going to burn through what money you have left and you’ll never pay off the rest of your debt and your credit score will tank and you’ll lose your home and you’re never going to work again and oh! You left such a perfect job, with such perfect colleagues! You’re never going to get that back!

You’ve made such a huge mistake, Leduc! How do you come back from this???

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In the early days of Buddhism, Gautama Buddha encouraged his disciples to seek out charnel grounds—places where dead bodies were either cremated or left to decompose out in the open—in order to contemplate the burnt and decomposing bodies. The idea was to see and acknowledge that all things return to this: from dust to dust, over and over again. We come from the Earth and we go back to her, and this is true for all things. You sit and face the decay of all that was once bright and beautiful to understand that this comes for everyone, no matter who or what they are.

I imagine the same sort of thing happens—on a different, very-much-otherworldly-level—for all of those astronauts who’ve ever had the chance to look at the Earth from space.

Your life is bright and beautiful and everything and it, too, will end in ash and dirt.

Your life is bright and beautiful and everything that ever was about it and all of the other lives that have ever lived on this planet are only the smallest bit of blue against the infinite black of the universe. Cosmic ash and dirt. Specks of it.

That’s all we are, at the end of it. Absolutely everything and absolutely nothing, all at the same time.

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One of the things that struck me the most about the Overview documentary was a quote from one of the founders of the Overview Institute, the organization that was started to try and impart some of that wisdom and perspective that astronauts feel when they return to Earth out to the wider world. We’re in space already, he said.

And it’s true. We like to think—at least, I did for a long time—about “outer space” as being somewhere up there above our heads, reachable only through the magic of science and long years of training. But the truth is that we’re all hurtling through space right now, on Spaceship Earth. The oxygen and life support is calibrated perfectly. (We’ve been tinkering with the measurements via climate change—perfection might soon be coming to an end.) We have food and water and entertainment and people to love. Some of us are lucky enough to know people who have pools.

Some of us are luckier than others. Some of us will have a harder time on Spaceship Earth than others. Either way: the charnel ground waits for us all, in one way or another.

And so: why be anxious? (Even though I will probably continue to be anxious for a time, perhaps forever.) Why not, instead, try to enjoy what’s right in front of you? The smell of that suntan lotion, the shock of the chlorinated pool. The ripple of your sister’s laugh as you joke in the car on the way home.

I don’t worry about money, a friend and fellow freelancer said to me about six weeks ago, when I was trying to decide whether to make that jump into freelancing or not. It’s only energy. I trust that it will come when it needs to, and that all will be okay.

It’s easier said than done, I think. I am finding it easier to trust on some days than on others.³ But I get up, I go outside, I look at the sun or the moon and the stars. I look at the trees, the cars, the squirrels, the bright red swings that children run to in the park. I try to pretend as though I need to be present with all of these things just as I’d need to be present for all of those dials and switches up on the ISS.

All of this is mine, for a time. Just as it is also yours. The blue sky and the green grass and the light that shines on all of us as we careen on our orbit around this main sequence star.

Paying attention can come from anxiety, yes, but it also comes from wonder. And there is so much around us to wonder at.

We live, after all, in such a wonderful world.

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Currently Reading: Mystic and Rider, by Sharon Shinn (diving back into old favourites because: anxiety!)

Currently Watching: Top Gun: Maverick (mostly for all of the Glen Powell scenes because, again: anxiety! I watched Hit Man this Friday and Anyone But You last night. Side note: I really enjoyed this piece from Anne Helen Petersen on Powell this week, and also this earlier one from Sheila O’Malley.)

Currently Eating: This Tofu Bulgogi Bowl from The Foodie Takes Flight

Currently Substacking: This wonderful essay from Kate Brook, over at The Babbling Brook—fellow anxious annies, unite! <3

1. I did not actually join the TikTok train as such, as I did not do a video. I just did housework. But somehow putting TikTok in there makes it seem that much more exciting.

2. Floating, really, if we’re going to be specific.

3. I was halfway through writing this newsletter when a fellow writer sent me an email to refer a writing client of hers to me. So—I’m going to keep on trusting. :)