200724 Existential Rocket to Mars

July 24

       Chapter 57:  Wherein Mumma comes to her senses and doesn't forsake her family.

   I recently had an “existential crisis” about becoming vegetarian (a whole n'other story). That crisis is on the back burner, simmering, while life in the pandemic continues to be very busy in that slow purposeful way, three-dimensionally as it were, or, because it concerns time waves, four-dimensional. 

   Today I recognized Surrender Never Surrender* as part of a bigger crisis, which is unresolved and still active: I have run out of spoons.** It was on the 3rd of July I felt disoriented (and a little punched in the stomach) - that’s where it started.*** But even while the stalled mosaic project began to work again, and I fell back in step with this universe, I realize today that these past three weeks and counting is one big existential crisis. 

   Since March II I have cared for my family through weeks of pandemic (115 days on July 3) and health challenges. The death of my mother-in-law in April was difficult for us all. She was K's mother, the children's grandmother and their children's great-grandmother. Our family relationships are undergoing changes and pressures from pandemic life. We are stressed by the strength of our feelings: as one, we face fear and uncertainty, financial and social deprivation. Having the children to care for adds more challenge, physical and emotional. The world around us is full of violence and suffering, somehow larger as the pandemic turns down the usual background noise. But there is not enough mutual support some days to go round. We are all wading in the same flood. 

  I have run out of spoons. I'm different, adrift. I have to slow down and let myself find my way. I need a cocoon.

   And now for something completely different:****

   

   The United Arab Emirates has launched a rocket to go and orbit Mars and learn stuff. They have a goal of living there by 2117. We are actually going to go to Mars! Unless something horrible happens in the meantime. I expect that to rocket and space buffs this is old news, but for me it's a happy surprise. There is a project called Emirates Mars Mission, headed up by Omran Sharaf (Project Director). What a Cool Job!! I wonder if he has read Kim Stanley Robinson! The rocked is called Amal, which means hope. They enlisted the aid of several countries and universities. It amazes me that it only cost US$200 million! (I have no idea how much it should cost, never having had a need to price one.) This is the fourth thing the UAE has shot into the sky that didn't come back down.

   "Amal, about the size of a small car, carries three instruments to study the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change while circling the red planet for at least two years. It is set to follow up on NASA's Maven Orbiter sent to Mars in 2014 (also don't remember) to study how it went from a warm wet world that may have harbored microbial life during its first billion years, to the cold barren place of today." [The Globe, July 21.*****]

What is most wonderful about this event is how hopeful it is; how brightly it shines as a beacon of optimism for humanity. 

[Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), Blue Mars (1996).]

* 200718 Surrender Never, this blog.

**spoons: a metaphor for “energy bites” one requires to get through the challenges of each day. One spoon for a shower, say, two spoons to give kids breakfast, etc. Your spoons carry different weight from anyone else's and some days you don't have as many, or you use them all up on some unexpected event.

*** 200703 Summer, this blog.

****Monty Python

*****The Globe and Mail, July 21, 2020, page A5