Week 6 thought of the day

This one is from the often-brilliant Radiolab podcast, in an episode called “The Cataclysm Sentence.” To me, it speaks to the tension between overwhelmed and on top of things… between being consequential and feeling tiny.

Writer: Maria Popova

We are each allotted a sliver of space-time between “not yet” and “no more,” which will fill with a lifetime of joys and sorrows, immensities of thought and feeling, all deducible to electrical impulses coursing through us at 80 feet per second, yet responsible for every love poem that has ever been written, every symphony ever composed, every scientific breakthrough measuring out nerve conduction, and mapping out space-time.

It’s astonishing that we’re not spending every day in marvel at the improbability that we even exist. Somehow, we went from bacteria to Bach. We learned to make fire and music and mathematics and here we are now, these walking wildernesses of mossy feelings and brambled thoughts beneath this overstory of 100 trillion synapses that are just coruscating with these restless questions. 

Why?