Distant Regard

Let’s get into it!

1. Photo: The Andromeda Galaxy

This isn’t just any other photo. Do this for me:

1. Click on the picture to see a zoomable version. The magic is in the details.

2. Take a moment. Try to grasp the scale, and imagine¹ what might exist across this vast expanse. Then…

3. Pick a spot—any spot—and click. Watch as your computer renders more tiny dots. Focus on one and try to imagine what’s possible around it.

4. Click again.

5. And again. (By click 3, my face is doing this: 😮)

6. Now scroll to the bottom-left corner of the image. Click until you hit pure whiteness. What iiis that? What’s around it? Water worlds? Planets made of diamond? Life? Feeling?

2. Video: It’s Not Boring to Be Here

Story time! Years ago, my friend Tom (okay, my boyfriend Tom, who I’m absolutely in love with), stumbled upon a video called Stop Pretending it’s Boring to be Alive. It was from a YouTuber whose style was, in Tom’s words, “eccentric, unsettling, and beautiful.” This guy, Steve Roggenbuck, had uploaded the video around 2011 and it only had about 200 views when Tom found it. Tom shared it with his friends, and one of them (hi Hales) used the audio to create a video for a school project. Eventually, Steve took the original video down, and I’m so grateful that the poem was preserved.²

I find it hard not to cry while watching this, and impossible not to laugh:

Tom later performed this poem at his best friend’s wedding (hi Dan). The full script is here (hi Armand).

Here are a couple of other videos from Steve. Trust me, you’ll want to watch these.

• start now gets so good — he starts to really rip at 1:30.³

• im waterfalling the whole sea is totally different and delightful⁴

3. Song: One World by Coldplay

Coldplay’s music has made me feel held lately. It started with their song Human Heart (with We Are King), and the lyric “a human heart, only got a human heart.” What a line!

Their latest album feels like a compilation of lullabies and worship songs about love and oneness. Same page, Coldplay. Same page.

4. Quote by Ram Dass

5. Poem: Distant Regard by Tony Hoagland

If I knew I would be dead by this time next year
I believe I would spend the months from now till then
writing thank-you notes to strangers and acquaintances,

telling them, “You really were a great travel agent.”
Or “I never got the taste of your kisses out of my mouth.”
Or “Watching you walk across the room was part of my destination.”

It would be the equivalent, I think,
of leaving a chocolate wrapped in shiny foil
on the pillow of a guest in a hotel—

“Hotel of earth, where we resided for some years together,”
I start to say—before I realize it is a terrible cliché, and stop,
and then go on, forgiving myself in a mere split second

because now that I’m dying, I just go
forward like water, flowing around obstacles
and second thoughts, not getting snagged, just continuing

with my long list of thank-yous
which seems to naturally expand
to include sunlight and wind,

and the aspen trees which gleam and shimmer in the yard
as if grateful for being soaked last night
by the beautiful irrigation system

invented by an individual
to whom I am quietly grateful.
Outside it is autumn, the philosophical season,

when cold air sharpens the intellect;
the hills are red and copper in their shaggy majesty.
The clouds blow overhead like governments and years.

It took me a long time to understand the phrase “distant regard,”
but I am grateful for it now,
and I am grateful for my heart,

that turned out to be good, after all;
and grateful for my mind,
to which, in retrospect, I can see

I have never been sufficiently kind.

-

From a human heart,

Lucy

P.S. Here’s a bonus long-form artifact—but it may take you an hour+ to get through. A colleague of mine (hi Steve) recently remarked that AI could be as significant as the Big Bang. If you want to understand how anyone could think that, this article will explain. Reading it back in 2015 made me feel like I had a hack—an early glimpse into the potential scale of AI before anyone was really talking about it.

Articles by Tim Urban (author of Wait but Why) on The AI Revolution

• The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence: Part 1

• The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction: Part 2

1  If stats might help your imagination, this image:
• was created as a mosaic of 7,398 exposures taken over the course of 411 pointings of the Hubble telescope
• spans across about 48,000 light-years(!!) of the Andromeda’s disk
• contains more than 100 million stars
• shows just one galaxy. It’s estimated that our universe has…… 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in it.

2  I hope it’s alright that we share his raw, unabashed words.

3  “I pioneered a new form of birdwatching called High Intensity Interval Birdwatching. You simply watch birds. Then you pause. And then you re-engage.”
“This tree is so this tree!”

4  “Twilight colors of the fin of a whale . . . please, take all of my clothes off in the first 15 minutes . . . I drank the water of the night sky . . . I drank the water of the absolute start of the morning . . . There are so many good things to think about now . . . Trees are slow. Obviously, trees are all the way slow . . . I don’t wanna have clothes.”