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- 🌀🐇 #259 surprises on the horizon, safety of pessimism, the happiness ruse
🌀🐇 #259 surprises on the horizon, safety of pessimism, the happiness ruse
Dispatches From Spaceship Fatherhood
⚡️ Enlightening Bolts
👎The Safety of Pessimism: What happens when you wake up the day after the world was meant to end? Read it here.
😐 The Happiness Ruse: How did feeling good become a matter of relentless, competitive work; a never-to-be-attained goal which makes us miserable? Read it here.
🪤 The Zuckerberg Trap: The history of computing you haven’t heard. Watch it here.
🎇 Image of The Week
On July 3, 2025, NASA astronaut Nicole Ayers captured a rare and stunning image of a gigantic jet from the International Space Station. Gigantic jets are a type of transient luminous event where powerful lightning discharges shoot upward from the top of a thunderstorm into the upper atmosphere, sometimes reaching altitudes of nearly 90 kilometers. Ayers used a Nikon Z9 camera to photograph the phenomenon while passing over Mexico and the southern United States. NASA highlighted the image as an extraordinary example of atmospheric electricity and later featured it as an Astronomy Picture of the Day. The photograph is significant not only for its beauty but also because these events are rarely observed and remain scientifically mysterious, making each capture valuable for researchers studying upper-atmospheric lightning.
🚀 Dispatches From Spaceship Fatherhood
It’s been more than seven months aboard Spaceship Fatherhood.
There’s a growing gravity to my son’s presence. His eyes are welling up with awareness, and when they lock with mine, they beam with recognition.
There’s this primordial love glowing from them, untouched by the layers of conditioned mental movements that pile up with age.
I felt tremendous love the day he was born, and somehow that love is inconceivably blooming in its depth. As he becomes more interactive and more of a participant in the world, our relationship grows and our bond deepens.
I can only imagine what it will feel like when he begins to address me, ask questions, and communicate his feelings.
It is such a gift to steward a new life. This is such a tender time, and it’s already moving so fast. I try to bring a reverent gratitude to all the steps and stages we are experiencing together.
He has given me a second set of firsts, this time witnessed from the outside looking in.
I’m doing my best to savor it as much as I can.
🎁 Surprises on The Horizon
Sit with this reminder from Haley Hoffman Smith:
When you heard the intro to your all-time favorite song, you didn't know that was an intro to a song, but you were going to listen to it literally hundreds of times to come. And when you met the closest person to you, your very best friend, your partner, you had no idea the morning of the day that you met them that you were about to meet somebody who was going to change your entire life.
You had no idea when you were checking your email that one time that you were about to get that opportunity in your inbox the night before the day that changed your life in the most epic and magical way. You did not know you were at a pivot point, that you were right there, that you were on the eve, on the precipice, of a whole new life chapter.
Right now, I know you're projecting what has happened onto the future. You're like, "Only this could happen because this is how it's been." But you forget that you've lived through so many epic surprises, and you did not know they were going to happen right before they happened or right when it was coming into your life. You saw that later. You look back now and you're like, "Wow, little did I know, little did I know, in that moment, how significant that was going to be for me, how magical that was going to be, how it was the last time I was going to be single, how it was the last time I was going to be without my dream job, how it was the last time I was going to feel creatively empathetic and fulfilled — because right after that, I came up with my book idea or my song idea, or I decided to go after that painting program I've always wanted to go after." You never know.
Here, in this moment, can you enjoy being on the precipice of what you do not know yet and trust your future self is looking back thinking, "Little did I know."
🤓 Learn This Word
Anemoia: Nostalgia for a time that you have never lived
⏳ From The Archives
A hand-picked link from a previous edition of 🌀🐇
Love Anyway
You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal.
I think about this and a passage from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum flits across the sky of my mind:
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
🎬 Endnote
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With Wonder,
Mike Slavin
