Celebrating him!

Funny, Clever and Brave...
Irreverent, Naughty and Rather Kind...
Loved and missed
Laughter is good. We all know that.

Knowing how to make people laugh and forget sweating the tedious small stuff for a little while is better yet!
It brings a kind of relaxation to the face -
and spirit!
Rob could do that...

Monday 2 January 2017

Perspective

Today would have been your 53rd birthday. It is the brightest sunniest morning, still and full of bird-song. And for me, at this moment, I am thinking of what a grand thing it is to be well-past 50. Oh, the relief! No more struggling uphill wondering who I am and where I am going. Nope. It’s all gently downhill now and into the valley. It’s a time of self-knowledge and assurance.

I have lost many friends whom I loved or liked since you died. Your death was the beginning of a wave. And yet, the more losses that come, the bigger the perspective I gain plus, oddly, the more calm….

 I’m fast running out of words. So over now to that great scientist and philosopher Carl Sagan:

 "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. 

 The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. 

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” 

Carl Sagan: Pale Blue Dot - A Vision of the Human Future in Space




2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Kate,

I still think of Rob (as Mutley), and have been recently transcribing my blogs for hardcopy print. Reading his tender and humorous remarks, his gentle wit still makes me smile. Unfortunately, it was a year after he passed that I found myself in the UK, and he would have been one of the first people I would have arranged to visit as he featured so heavily throughout my blogging days. I will never forget Rob.

Rups :)

merry weather said...

Dear Rups,

How kind of you. He spoke very fondly of you too, I remember that. Those early blogging days were exciting, the beginning of world-wide connections. Special times. Wonderful that your blogs are now going into print! So glad :-)

Kate