Expanding our perspective in stressful times
As I write this, President Trump is on his way to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he’ll be saying who-knows-what to global leaders.
On Tuesday, he marked the first year of his second term spending “1 hour and 45 minutes in the White House briefing room opining on everything from his relationship with foreign leaders to God’s pride in him,” reports The Associated Press.
He also issued a proclamation declaring Tuesday a “National Day of Patriotic Devotion.”
In the proclamation, Trump cites his first-year achievements and says, “January 20, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day our Nation was restored to its full greatness and glory.”
As I was writing yesterday about Trump’s moves to take over Greenland, my mind kept returning to what helps me to keep whatever happens in perspective.
Apologies, longtime readers, you’ve heard this before:
Physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking described us humans as “just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star.”
Maria Popova, writer of the blog Marginalia, says, “The reason I love thinking about the evolutionary time scale is it reminds us that we’re actually a very young species in the scheme of things, we’re barely reaching our adolescence.”
So of course we mess things up.
Popova is a big thinker who writes about big thinkers. In a post on universal kinship, she says:
“The astonishing thing is that even though we will never truly know what it is like to be another creature or another person or any configuration of chemistry and chance other than ourselves, we are made of the same matter as the granite that will mark our graves and share 98 percent of our DNA with the moss that will cover them.”
“To know this, to place the firm hand of the mind on this banister of reality, is to steady yourself amid the daily shocks of living. To feel it is something else entirely — it is to press this perishable hand against the beating heart of the universe that made it and tremble with its pulse in your veins.”
I wish you a wonderful day, readers, even if we may repeatedly need to call on our notions of being part of the universe and therefore bigger than whatever troubles we may face.
Also in the news
Robert Reich’s memo to Europe: ‘Remember Neville Chamberlain’
AP: Surrounded by billionaires in Davos, Trump plans to use key speech to lay out how he’ll make housing more affordable in U.S.
Trump signs executive order seeking to curb Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
WPost: Trump administration acknowledges for first time in court filing that DOGE accessed and shared Social Security data
Justice Department serves subpoenas to Walz, Frey and other Minnesota officials amid immigration crackdown
Bondi says Lindsey Halligan has departed Justice Department after judge bars her continued use of U.S. attorney title
NYTimes: How Trump is pushing to expand presidential power in his second term
NYTimes: Some ways Trump is remaking America, state by state
NYTimes: Falsehoods have fueled Trump’s first year back in office
WSJ: 6,000 Truth Social posts later, here are the promises Trump has kept and broken since returning to office
New ‘Be The People’ campaign wants to unite hundreds of millions of Americans to solve problems
ProPublica: Women with high-risk pregnancies have limited options in states with abortion bans