Japan launched a spacecraft toward Mars yesterday. The Martian Moons Exploration mission is expected to begin studying Phobos next September and eventually bring samples back to Earth. If it succeeds, we will have retrieved material from a Martian moon for the first time. I understand very little of the engineering involved. Yet I understand enough to be astonished that we can intend to go somewhere so far away and make arrangements for the return.
I have spent enough of my life watching Star Wars to be an unreliable judge of the proper response to a spacecraft. I want to tell someone about it; I want to hear what astonishes them. I pictured rooms in which people once gathered around televisions to watch a launch, and wished for the pleasure of being absorbed in something with strangers, of having, briefly, the same reason to be over the moon.
The patience of the enterprise moves me almost as much as its ambition. People have made plans for years ahead, built instruments for questions they cannot yet answer, and trusted that the answers will be worth the effort. There is a future here that someone has thought about with curiosity and care. I have missed that feeling in the news: the sense that what comes next might be something we have reason to look forward to together.
When I wondered why a story like this seemed to pass so quickly, I thought of all the noise. There was too much happening; everything arrived before we had finished thinking about the thing before it. A new report, another photograph, something terrible that had happened while we were still trying to understand what happened yesterday. I was using noise to describe the experience of receiving it all at once, without enough time to think or any clear idea of what to do.
But the word was inadequate to what I meant. The stories that overwhelmed me were accounts of lives being overwhelmed. What reached me as news was, for someone else, the place they had woken up that morning, the person they were waiting to hear from, the question of where they could safely go. My wish for a little more room to be excited about something began to feel connected to a much larger wish: that there were less for people to be frightened of.
Someone trying to keep a home or find out whether a relative is alive is already giving their attention to something that matters enormously. Someone who cannot make the rent may have very little patience left for a reminder of what an extraordinary time it is to be alive. I understand that. Their difficulty is immediate, and a discovery millions of miles away cannot make it less so. When I think about why it is hard to gather around a piece of wonderful news, I think increasingly about how much people are carrying into the room.
For someone afraid of deportation, a government’s ambitions in space may offer little reassurance about its intentions toward them. An invitation to take pride in a country can sound very different when one is unsure of being allowed to remain in it. A scientific achievement can belong to humanity and still feel far removed from the circumstances of a particular human life. I want to remember that distance when I find myself wishing the excitement were more widely shared.
I am fortunate that much of what frightens me reaches me from a distance. I can put the news down and still expect the people I love to be where I left them. I can make plans for Saturday with a reasonable expectation of keeping them. These are ordinary assumptions in my life, so familiar that I rarely have to consider how much rests on them. I wish more people could make them. I wish the expectation of an uneventful afternoon were something everyone could take for granted.
A reminder that there are still beautiful things in the world cannot answer all of this. The people who are frightened may already know exactly what is beautiful in it: the people they love, the neighborhood they know, the ordinary life they are trying to preserve. Those attachments are often what make fear so painful. I would like to see those lives made safer. Asking people to look past what threatens them would leave the threat in place.
And yet I struggle to know what to do with the distress I feel on their behalf. There are days when I have read more grief than I know how to respond to, although I understand that reading about it is very different from living it. The people in these stories continue to matter to me when I close the article. What becomes harder to hold on to is a clear sense of how to reach them. I think of what is happening in one place, then in another, then of all the suffering that has not found its way into the news, until my wish to help becomes entangled with the fear that whatever I can offer will be absurdly small.
That is the numbness I worry about. Sometimes I pass a story because I cannot bear to take in another account of something I desperately wish were otherwise. Sometimes I feel that I already know what I will find, and dread the helplessness of finding it again. I do not want that feeling to become the settled way I meet the world. I want to remain capable of being moved by people, and to find somewhere for that feeling to go.
The question of how to help is a real one. I cannot stop a war by reading about it. A letter may go unanswered; a protest may end with the situation apparently unchanged. It is painful to care about something over which one has so little control, and I understand the exhaustion of people who have been trying for much longer than I have. I cannot offer myself, or anyone else, a convincing promise that one more effort will be the one that makes the difference.
I wish knowing what to do came as readily as knowing that something was wrong. Sometimes there is a clear request for help; sometimes I finish reading with more questions than I had before. I would like to follow those questions a little further, even when I don’t know where they will lead.
The affection I feel when I read about the spacecraft is real. So is the concern I feel for people whose circumstances are frightening, and whose futures have become difficult to imagine. Both come, I think, from wanting a little more closeness to lives beyond my own. The harder task is finding how to make that closeness useful where it is needed.
I still hope we will watch the next launch together. Between now and then, I want to find out where I can help, and keep showing up in whatever ways I can. Perhaps a world with a little less to grieve would have a little more time to look up.
