… of its content, this might have been posted 12/28/6, the day I wrote and sent it to my coworkers. But it wasn’t:
Friends,
If you can imagine a universe-sized sponge made of galaxies surrounding bubble-like voids, congratulations: you’re hip to the current scientific model of the Big Picture.
We humans don’t always do too well with the Big Picture, though. Our tiny brains like to slice reality into assimilable, us-sized bites. Instead of Limitless Space, we distinguish between Here and There; instead of Eternity, we think about Then and Now. Sometimes, we even think about Later.
Every time our planet completely circles its star, many of us commit to doing (often changing) something as we travel the orbit to come. (That orbit doesn’t actually start on January 1st — that’s a date as arbitrary as the alphabet I’m using to type this email — but as the man draining the swamp said, “You have to start somewhere.”) If it’s your custom to do that, may you have the strength to live up to your commitments. If it’s also your custom to become frustrated with yourself a week later, take heart — it’s a big universe, with enough room to start over and enough time for patience.
Happy New Year, whenever it finds you.