We Are Both

all artwork by author

On Friday evening I watched four human beings return to Earth from an extended voyage to the farthest place in the solar system that humans have ever been before. I sat in my reading chair with a heated blanket as the Artemis capsule broke through Earth’s atmosphere and fell from the sky toward the ocean. Then I watched as the parachutes bloomed, and I sat in my living room with my hand over my mouth as I witnessed this seemingly impossible space vessel of human ingenuity bob in the waters and the reassurance of gravity.

Sometimes I don’t know how to hold the wonder of what human beings are capable of, in ways both everyday ordinary and extremely extraordinary. I mean, the mathematics of this Artemis mission alone, the trajectories calculated, the margins of error measured in fractions of fractions of fractions, the thousands of minds across decades of scientific exploration whose work came together in that single floating, plasma-covered capsule. Even more amazing to me? That before the incomprehensible math, there was the vision. Someone had to first ask the question—if it was possible to leave this planet, to fly to the moon, and to go even beyond that. Someone had to say yes when every reasonable voice said “Hmm, maybe not yet, maybe never.”

I find this astonishing. I find it almost unbearably moving. At the same time I have profound unresolved questions about all of it when it comes to space exploration, the staggering costs as people right here still go hungry and without shelter. Then there is the environmental toll, and what it even means for human beings to plant their colonialising flags beyond this planet we already inhabit where we haven’t yet learned to all get along or properly take care of—not even a little bit. I don’t know enough to argue those questions well, and this probably isn’t the place to try, but none of that is what filled my mind with questions on Friday night and ever since. What filled me with questions was far simpler and perhaps even harder to explain.

Ukraine. Gaza. Iran. Lebanon. Sudan. And on and on. The names of places that have become examples of what massive destruction and evil we are also capable of, undeniably, at the same moment in history that we are breaking scientific glass ceilings with our collective imaginations, intelligence and ability to wonder that all important question, “what if.” At the same exact time, men with no ability to wonder except when it involves power, greed and their small-prick wounded egos, and the reckless and immoral determination to take what they want regardless of the cost to other people’s lives and our shared planet’s ability to thrive. Instead, their goals are bombing while entire cities are reduced to rubble and children are living without any sense of security or access to food and clean water. Theirs is a particular kind of destruction that isn’t accidental or inevitable but chosen, again and again, by people who could choose otherwise.

This is also what human beings are capable of.

I want there to be a way to make these two things make sense together, to find the thread that explains how the same species that calculated precise parachute deployment over the Pacific after travelling 24,000 MPH to break through the Earth’s atmosphere is also the species who cannot come to an agreement that all might feel good about and benefit from, all while burning hospitals to the ground and blowing up the schools of little girls. I would love a tidy little insight, and you know what? I just don’t have one, because it doesn’t exist.

What I have instead is this: both are true at the same time, a concept seemingly harder and harder for human beings to grasp, myself included. The bobbing space capsule miracle and the rubble of war-destroyed real human lives. The life-saving parachutes and the life-taking bombs. The brilliant ever-questioning scientists and the vile know-it-all strongmen. We contain all of it, and I don’t think we get to claim the wonder without also claiming the horror and the grief.

Maybe that’s what it means to pay attention with eyes wide open and still contain a heart full of wonder and awe. We don’t need to choose which human story to believe in, the ascending one or the descending one, but to hold them both without looking away. To let the moon voyage be genuinely miraculous and to let the wars be genuinely monstrous and to resist the temptation to let one cancel the other out.

If I let the morally bankrupt leaders and the wars convince me that we are only capable of destruction, I lose something true, and if I let the wonder of spaceflight and the poetic thoughts of an astronaut with an intimate look at Earth from the dark side of the moon convince me that we are basically good and things basically tend toward the light, I am lying. Maybe this is a simplistic understanding, but it’s what I’ve got today.

We are both. Astonishingly, heartbreakingly, both.

On Friday evening I watched human beings do something magnificent, and somewhere on the same planet, in many other places in the very same moment, terrible and unnecessary things were also happening. I held my hand over my mouth in wonder, and somewhere else on this beautiful, magical Earth a mother was covering her child’s ears against the sound of something violently-man-made exploding and falling far too near.