My Dad noticed it before I did. “You’re really getting into this,” he said, after I mentioned the NASA Artemis II launch for what was probably the third time that day. He wasn’t wrong. This one hit differently than I expected.
Watching coverage of the mission, I kept returning to something previous astronauts had described: Earth looks so small from out there.
Yet, they also knew that on that dot, eight billion people were going about their days, building their habits, nursing their worries, and caring deeply about the smallest of daily details. From a few thousand miles away, those details are truly invisible. I imagine that perspective has a way of reorganizing your priorities fast.
God placed eternity in our hearts. I think that’s part of why the heavenly perspective resonates so deeply with us, even when pondering from ground level. It points to something we already sense, that we were made to hold both the vast and the small at the same time, and that the health of a life depends on keeping those two things in right relationship.
I think it’s neat that the crew of Artemis II chose to name their craft: “Integrity.”
A friend of mine has a take on daily habits that I find compelling. His point is essentially that “integrity” isn’t a single decision, it’s the accumulated weight of carefully chosen small ones, repeated over time. If you want to be a person of integrity, you have to build habits founded on good actions, and those habits have to be cultivated so they will bear good fruit.
You don’t get the big thing right by ignoring the little things. But the little things only mean something when they’re oriented in light of the big things.
That’s the tension I’ve been sitting with ever since the NASA launch. Zoom out far enough and almost nothing seems to matter – zoom way in and the details are everything. The goal isn’t to pick one or the other, it’s to practice moving between them regularly and letting them inform one another.
For me, practically, this has meant taking a hard look at where my time and attention are going; I’ve been feeling a renewed sense of what is actually worth creating and posting online as of late. My standard buckets of information – photography and creative media – are chock full of specs, hardware comparisons, incremental gear updates.
I’ve come to realize that these just don’t deserve my time nor attention. Not because those things are wrong, because they don’t stack up toward anything I actually care about, when I zoom out. There’s a kind of naive simplicity, almost a willful ignorance, in letting constant noise crowd out the signals with lasting importance.
What I want instead is to spend my time on things that will carry my family forward, that will reflect a life lived with some coherent sense of purpose. When I think about the decisions I’m making now – how I spend a Wednesday, what I write about, what I choose to ignore – I want those decisions to hold up against that outer space perspective.
Not grand gestures, just honest ones, built from habits that speak to the man of integrity that I’m trying to be.
I’ll leave you with this perspective that the Artemis II crew had on their official mission patch:
The Earth represents home, focused on the perspective we gain when we look back at our shared planet and learn what it is to be uniquely human.
— NASA
So, yeah, I guess that I’m really getting into this mission. I recommend you do the same. Zoom all the way out. See what truly matters. Then zoom back in and plan your days accordingly.