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[Oliver Jeffers]
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[An ode to living on Earth]
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Hello.
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I'm sure by the time
I get to end of this sentence,
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given how I talk,
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you'll all have figured out
that I'm from a place called
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planet Earth.
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Earth is pretty great.
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It's home to us.
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And germs.
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Those [blip] take a back seat
for the time being,
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because believe it or not,
they're not the only thing going on.
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This planet is also home
to cars, brussels sprouts;
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those weird fish things
that have their own headlights;
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art;
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fire, fire extinguishers,
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laws, pigeons, bottles of beer,
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lemons and light bulbs;
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Pinot noir and paracetamol;
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ghosts, mosquitoes, flamingos, flowers,
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the ukulele, elevators and cats,
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cat videos, the internet;
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iron beams, buildings and batteries,
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all ingenuity and bright ideas,
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all known life,
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and a whole bunch of other stuff.
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Pretty much everything we know
and ever heard of.
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It's my favorite place, actually.
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This small orb,
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floating in a cold and lonely
part of the cosmos.
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Oh, the accent is from Belfast,
by the way, which is ...
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here.
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Roughly.
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You may think you know this planet Earth,
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as you're from here.
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But chances are,
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you probably haven't thought
about the basics in a while.
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I thought I knew it.
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Thought I was an expert, even.
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Until, that is, I had to explain
the entire place,
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and how it's supposed to work,
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to someone who had never been here before.
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Now that you might think,
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although my dad always did say
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the sure sign of intelligent
life out there
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is that they haven't bothered
trying to contact us.
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It was actually my newborn son
I was trying to explain things to.
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We'd never been parents before,
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my wife and I,
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and so treated him like most guests
when he arrived home for the first time,
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by giving him the tour.
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This is where you live, son.
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This room is where we make food at.
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This is the room we keep
our collection of chairs, and so on.
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It's refreshing,
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explaining how our planet works
to a zero-year-old.
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But after the laughs,
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and once the magnitude that new humans
know absolutely nothing
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settles on you and how little
you know [unclear],
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explaining the whole planet
becomes quite intimidating.
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But I tried anyway.
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As I walked around those first few weeks,
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narrating the world as I saw it,
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I began to take notes
of the ridiculous things I was saying.
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The notes slowly morphed into a letter
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intended for my son
once he learned to read.
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And that letter became a book
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about the basic principles
of what it is to be a human
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living on Earth in the 21st century.
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Some things are really obvious.
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Like, the planet is made of two parts:
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land and sea.
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Some less obvious
until you think about them.
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Like, time.
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Things can sometimes
move slowly here on Earth.
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But more often, they move quickly.
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So use your time well,
it will be gone before you know it.
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Or people.
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People come in all different
shapes, sizes and colors.
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We may all look different,
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act different and sound different,
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but don't be fooled.
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We are all people.
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It doesn't skip me that of all
the places in the universe,
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people only live on Earth,
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can only live on Earth.
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And even then, only
on some of the dry bits.
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There's only a very small
part of the surface of our planet
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that is actually habitable to human life,
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and squeezed in here
is where all of us live.
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It's easy to forget
when you're up close to the dirt,
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the rocks, the foliage,
the concrete of our lands,
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just how limited the room
for maneuvering is.
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From a set of eyes close to the ground,
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the horizon feels like it goes forever.
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After all, it's not an every-day ritual
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to consider where we are
on the ball of our planet
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and where that ball is in space.
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I didn't want to tell my son
the same story of countries
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that we were told where I was growing up
in Northern Ireland.
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That we were from just a small parish,
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which ignores life outside
its immediate concerns.
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I wanted to try to feel
what it was like to see our planet
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as one system, as a single object,
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hanging in space.
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To do this,
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I would need to switch from
flat drawings for books,
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to 3D sculpture for the street,
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and I'd need almost 200 feet,
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a New York City block,
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to build a large-scale model of the moon,
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the Earth and us.
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This project managed to take place
on New York City's Highline park
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last winter,
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on the 50th anniversary
of Apollo 11's mission around the Moon.
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After its installation,
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I was able to put on
a space helmet with my son
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and launch, like Apollo 11 did
half a century ago,
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towards the Moon.
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We circled around,
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and looked back at us.
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What I felt was
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how lonely it was there in the dark.
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And I was just pretending.
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The Moon is the only object
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even remotely close to us.
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And at the scale of this project,
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where our planet was 10 feet in diameter,
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Mars, the next planet,
will be the size of a yoga ball
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and a couple of miles away.
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Although borders
are not visible from space,
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on my sculpture,
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every single border was drawn in.
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But rather than writing the country names
on the carved-up land,
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I wrote over and over again,
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"people live here, people live here."
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"People live here."
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And off on the Moon, it was written,
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"No one lives here."
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Often, the obvious things
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aren't all that obvious
until you think about them.
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Seeing anything from
a vast enough distance
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changes everything,
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as many astronauts have experienced.
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And human eyes have only
ever seen our Earth
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from as far as the Moon, really.
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It's quite away further
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before we get to the edges
of our own Solar System.
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And even out to other stars,
to the constellations.
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There is actually only one point
in the entire cosmos
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that is present in all
constellations of stars,
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and that presence is
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here, planet Earth.
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Those pictures we have made up
for the clusters of stars
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only make sense from
this point of view down here.
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Their stories only make sense
here on Earth.
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And only something to us.
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To people.
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We are creatures of stories.
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We are the stories we tell,
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we're the stories we're told.
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Consider briefly the story
of human civilization on Earth.
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It tells of the ingenuity, elegance,
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generous and nurturing nature of a species
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that is also self-focused, vulnerable,
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and defiantly protective.
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We, the people shield
the flame of our existence
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from the raw, vast elements
outside our control,
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the great beyond.
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Yet it is always to the flame we look.
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For all we know,
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when said as a statement,
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it means the sum total of all knowledge.
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But when said another way,
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for all we know,
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it means that we do not know at all.
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This is the beautiful,
fragile drama of civilization.
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We are the actors and spectators
of a cosmic play
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that means the world to us here,
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but means nothing anywhere else.
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Possibly not even that much
down here, either.
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If we truly thought about
our relationship with our boat,
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with out Earth,
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it might be more of a story
of ignorance and greed.
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As is the case with Fausto,
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a man who believed he owned everything
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and set out to survey what was his.
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He easily claims ownership of a flower,
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a sheep, a tree and a field.
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The lake and the mountain
prove harder to conquer,
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but they, too, surrender.
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It is in trying to own the open sea
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where his greed proves his undoing,
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when, in a fit of arrogance,
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he climbs overboard
to show that sea who is boss.
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But he does not understand,
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slips beneath the waves
and sinks to the bottom.
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The sea was sad for him,
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but carried on being the sea.
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As did all the other objects
of his ownership.
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But the fate of Fausto
does not matter to them.
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For all the importance in the cosmos
we believe we hold,
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we'd have nothing
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if not for this Earth.
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While it would keep happily spinning,
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obliviously without us.
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On this planet, there are people.
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We have gone about our days,
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sometimes we look up and out,
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mostly we look down and in.
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Looking up and by drawing lines
between the lights in the sky,
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we've attempted to make
sense out of chaos.
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Looking down, we've drawn lines
across the land to know where we belong,
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and where we don't.
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We do mostly forget that these lines
that connect the stars
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and those lines that divide the land
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live only in our heads.
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They, too, are stories.
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We carry out our everyday
routines and rituals
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according to the stories
we most believe in,
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and these days, the story
is changing as we write it.
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There is a lot of fear
in this current story,
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and until recently,
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the stories that seemed
to have the most power
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are those of bitterness,
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of how it had all gone wrong
for us individually and collectively.
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It has been inspiring to watch
how the best comes from the worst.
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How people are waking up
in this time of global reckoning,
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to the realization that our
connections with each other
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are some of the most
important things we have.
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But stepping back.
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For all we've had to lament,
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we spend very little time relishing
the single biggest thing
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that has ever gone right for us.
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That we are here in the first place,
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that we are alive at all.
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That we are still alive.
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A million and a half years
after finding a box of matches,
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we haven't totally burned the house down.
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Yet.
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The chances of being here
are infinitesimal.
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Yet here we are.
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Perils and all.
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There have never been
more people living on Earth.
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Using more stuff.
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And it's become obvious
that many of the old systems
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we invented for ourselves
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are obsolete.
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And we have to build new ones.
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If it wasn't germs,
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our collective fire
might suffocate us before long.
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As we watch the wheels
of industry grind to a halt,
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the machinery of progress become silent,
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we have the wildest of opportunities
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to hit the reset button.
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To take a different path.
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Here we are on Earth.
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And life on Earth is a wonderful thing.
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It looks big, this Earth,
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but there are lots of us on here.
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Seven and a half billion at last count,
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with more showing up every day.
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Even so,
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there is still enough for everyone,
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if we all share a little.
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So please,
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be kind.
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When you think of it another way,
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if Earth is the only place
where people live,
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it's actually the least
lonely place in the universe.
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There are plenty of people to be loved by,
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and plenty of people to love.
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We need each other.
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We know that now, more than ever.
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Good night.