We’re 7+ Billion Strong For A Reason
On gratitude to our planet, fear of the future, and love for each other
Note: I wrote this on Thanksgiving Day 2019, as a note of gratitude to our planet and a reminder to each other to preserve life and love in all its fragility. In our present pandemic reality, I feel this resonates as strongly as ever.
As I prop up my laptop in a dark room, the throbbing connectivity to the world and its every atom blinds my mind with an awareness of heartbreaking helplessness.
What is the invisible energy-matter upholding existence; the reason for the piercing cry we’re birthed into life with; the Mona Lisa smile briefly captured somewhere in the middle of being, left to figure out later, if ever, if lucky? My cry of helplessness is that of watching the tapestry of our interconnected world unwind string by string before my children-to-be are ever able to ask those questions.
At the brink of 2020, ours feels like a world praying for a miracle. A world of desperate struggle — for equality, for a sense of forgotten peace, for love. A world of ‘liking’ strangers but still having trouble loving our true selves and anyone different from us. A world writhing in pain — through shushed yet ongoing wars, innocent deaths, the disconnectedness of people and the digitalization of relationships.
As I sit still, wondering if I ever come to live to the age of my grandparents, and how that world will look like, what its identity will be, world leaders engage in power battles, never once turning to face the excruciating death of the human race nor striving to fathom why young people are massively questioning their very existence within the future.
From my humble place in the universe, I boldly question those in power — do they ever stoop down to hear the life of this planet beseeching for love, the life they incite towards hate in order to raise their power to yet another degree? Do they comprehend that an atom in this world is worth more than all human power, for it will outlive their skeleton by millennia?
And then I shudder: what will we do if love fails us? Love for each other, and love for our planet?
“What if it were for the children,” he asks me over coffee, “would you leave apocalyptic earth for a state-of-the-art spaceship to save them?”
It’s not like I always talk about the end of the world over lunch, so this might have qualified for the most disruptive coffee I had in a long time. I’m also no great fan of space travel — SpaceX and such has me more concerned than excited. Nonetheless, there is the reassuring hope we’re still talking theory.
“Any normal mother would do everything to protect her children,” I replied, briefly thinking if he meant our hypothetical children and then remembering how all sorts of resulting dystopia pledged “for the sake of children” who never asked us for it. Like every someday-mother-to-be, all my knowledge of ‘normality’ comes down to theory, no practice. But in my view, that ‘normality’ absolutely extends to sacrificing personal interests for the life of her children.
Even as motherhood is currently outside the visible horizon, I keep going back to that strange question, “would you leave earth for the sake of your children” over and over, vaguely wishing in the back of my mind that if everyone were leaving earth and flying off to space, I — and my family — would still have the courage to fight. To fight for the rebirth of this world, of our world — not just flee and seek another.
In that hypothetical apocalypse, I’ve got a lot of hypothetical questions for myself as a human being. Would I have the courage to persist, to survive, to question the mainstream? What about the courage to teach my children to fight for their own planet? The ability to protect them in this endeavor and inspire with my own example? Not wishing to drop into Sarah Connor’s shoes, I still occasionally replay the scenario as a thought experiment within my head.
In my version of a ‘happy end’, I always imagine landing on a morning summer field (the kind still wet with dew) after a long, long flight. I imagine that kind of Earth — all ready to spring from the ashes. And I understand that to breathe fully, I’ll always need the blue and puffy sky over my head as dearly as the safety of that head on my shoulders.
“Since light is carried by photons,” he goes on, carried away by the idea, “we could reproduce an earthly sky and absolutely anything on the spaceship.”
Sure, the effect of light can be reproduced. The luminescence in your heart as you practically inhale the sunset in the ocean, can’t. I shake my head and say that the sky is if not eternity, then as close to it as we can get and I wouldn’t trade it for any genius simulation.
He thinks I’m being emotional. Or not. Doesn't he know that beauty can only be created, never copied, never reproduced?
For a moment, I wonder if I’m being emotional too. And then I wonder — how does that kind of bio-tech, space-savvy future sound? A future where we would have given up on Earth, forever?
I stand under the starry canopy of millennia staring back at me with but a twinkle in its eye, the throbbing connectivity to this world washing me over with a feeling of heartbreaking unity.
All the beauty that our planet has gifted us with — every bee pollinating a flower, every ocean drop carried off by the tide, every child rocked to sleep at this moment — all are part of one ecosystem of interdependence and unity. It is an ecosystem of love that our planet has gifted us with while asking for nothing except gratitude and love in return.
As a species, we can survive practically anywhere — history has seen us in caves, in deserts, in exile, in ruin. Each time, we’ve risen from the ashes. This means that surviving in a spaceship, probably even on Mars, with the right bunch of stuff, won’t be an impossibility.
The question, however, is not whether we shall survive — it is whether we shall retain our humaneness in an environment where the chain of our millennia-long communion with mother nature and each other is broken.
At its current rate, every thirteen years, the population of mothership Earth grows by a billion more. By 2030, the UN projects it topping 8.5 billion. Population charts showing the stats for the past century resemble one panicky rollercoaster climb. The kind of climb where you’re blindfolded in a dark tunnel but your stomach is already tensing up in fear.
And then it drops on us. Just like that — as we look at the surging violence in our societies, the ongoing fight to respect each human identity and body, the struggle to protect our environment for our kids and theirs — our body and mind feel like they’re falling through darkness and shutting off from sheer overdrive. Paradoxically for spaceship Earth, being 7.7 billion strong is sending us into the overdrive of helplessness.
Many a day, I feel nothing but the overdrive mode shutting off my emotions and will to believe in change. Many a day, I’m someone who doesn’t believe in flying off to Mars because — hell, we’d just start the same thing all over again up there and blow Mars up sooner or later. And yet, in the middle of this helplessness, I realize that the reason our world is still alive is because of the beauty we create, the hope we dare to feel, and our togetherness in times of pain.
Our world is alive because, within each personal identity, there is a part of our mutual identity. Being strikingly unique, we’re also part of the single identity of the universe that was once a burning, united mass of energy — once, before the Big Bang brought us all apart. This is the ‘once’ those billion-year-old stars are there to remind us of; the ‘once’ of a baby’s cry piercing through the night air; the ‘once’ that Mona Lisa is (perhaps) smiling about.
In 1939, on the verge of a world catastrophe, Wystan Hugh Auden wrote his most provocative verse, “We must love one another or die.” Eighty years later, as we struggle to hold hands and unite in a society that’s still trying to tear us apart, these verses remind us that we already know what to do.
The history of humankind may have started with bloodshed, but the survival of humankind depends on our will to love. The love that becomes action and gratitude towards each other and our planet. The gratitude that can still save our planet.
There are 7.7 billion of us at this very moment — hoping, dreaming, suffering, loving on Earth — a Pale Blue Dot in the universe. We may seem disconnected in real life, helpless, lost. But we’ve also got a power much greater than any single world power — the power of the pre-Big-Bang, pre-overdrive, gut-driven, disruptive will to create change through love and gratitude.
The will that declares: we’re 7+ billion strong for a reason — we cannot be coerced into hate, ever again.
