An ode to living on Earth

If you had to explain to a newborn what it means to be a human being living on Earth in the 21st century, what would you say? Visual artist Oliver Jeffers put his answer in a letter to his son, sharing pearls of wisdom on existence and the diversity of life. He offers observations of the “beautiful, fragile drama of human civilization” in this poetic talk paired with his original illustrations and animations.

[Oliver Jeffers]

[An ode to living on Earth]

Hello.

I'm sure by the time
I get to end of this sentence,

given how I talk,

you'll all have figured out
that I'm from a place called

planet Earth.

Earth is pretty great.

It's home to us.

And germs.

Those [blip] take a back seat
for the time being,

because believe it or not,
they're not the only thing going on.

This planet is also home
to cars, brussels sprouts;

those weird fish things
that have their own headlights;

art, fire,

fire extinguishers,

laws, pigeons, bottles of beer,

lemons and light bulbs;

Pinot noir and paracetamol;

ghosts, mosquitoes, flamingos, flowers,

the ukulele, elevators and cats,

cat videos, the internet;

iron beams, buildings and batteries,

all ingenuity and bright ideas,
all known life ...

and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Pretty much everything we know
and ever heard of.

It's my favorite place, actually.

This small orb,

floating in a cold and lonely
part of the cosmos.

Oh, the accent is from Belfast,
by the way, which is ...

here.

Roughly.

You may think you know this planet Earth,

as you're from here.

But chances are,

you probably haven't thought
about the basics in a while.

I thought I knew it.

Thought I was an expert, even.

Until, that is, I had to explain
the entire place,

and how it's supposed to work,

to someone who had never been here before.

Not what you might think,

although my dad always did say

the sure sign of intelligent
life out there

is that they haven't bothered
trying to contact us.

It was actually my newborn son
I was trying to explain things to.

We'd never been parents before,

my wife and I,

and so treated him like most guests
when he arrived home for the first time,

by giving him the tour.

This is where you live, son.

This room is where we make food at.

This is the room we keep
our collection of chairs, and so on.

It's refreshing,

explaining how our planet works
to a zero-year-old.

But after the laughs,

and once the magnitude that new humans
know absolutely nothing

settles on you and how little
you know either,

explaining the whole planet
becomes quite intimidating.

But I tried anyway.

As I walked around those first few weeks,

narrating the world as I saw it,

I began to take notes
of the ridiculous things I was saying.

The notes slowly morphed into a letter

intended for my son
once he learned to read.

And that letter became a book

about the basic principles
of what it is to be a human

living on Earth in the 21st century.

Some things are really obvious.

Like, the planet is made of two parts:

land and sea.

Some less obvious
until you think about them.

Like, time.

Things can sometimes
move slowly here on Earth.

But more often, they move quickly.

So use your time well,
it will be gone before you know it.

Or people.

People come in all different
shapes, sizes and colors.

We may all look different,

act different and sound different,

but don't be fooled.

We are all people.

It doesn't skip me that of all
the places in the universe,

people only live on Earth,

can only live on Earth.

And even then,
only on some of the dry bits.

There's only a very small
part of the surface of our planet

that is actually habitable to human life,

and squeezed in here
is where all of us live.

It's easy to forget
when you're up close to the dirt,

the rocks, the foliage,
the concrete of our lands,

just how limited the room
for maneuvering is.

From a set of eyes close to the ground,

the horizon feels like it goes forever.

After all, it's not an every-day ritual

to consider where we are
on the ball of our planet

and where that ball is in space.

I didn't want to tell my son
the same story of countries

that we were told where I was growing up
in Northern Ireland.

That we were from just a small parish,

which ignores life
outside its immediate concerns.

I wanted to try to feel
what it was like to see our planet

as one system, as a single object,

hanging in space.

To do this,

I would need to switch
from flat drawings for books

to 3D sculpture for the street,

and I'd need almost 200 feet,

a New York City block,

to build a large-scale model of the moon,

the Earth and us.

This project managed to take place
on New York City's High Line park

last winter,

on the 50th anniversary
of Apollo 11's mission around the Moon.

After its installation,

I was able to put on
a space helmet with my son

and launch, like Apollo 11 did
half a century ago,

towards the Moon.

We circled around

and looked back at us.

What I felt was

how lonely it was there in the dark.

And I was just pretending.

The Moon is the only object

even remotely close to us.

And at the scale of this project,

where our planet was 10 feet in diameter,

Mars, the next planet,
will be the size of a yoga ball

and a couple of miles away.

Although borders
are not visible from space,

on my sculpture,

every single border was drawn in.

But rather than writing the country names
on the carved-up land,

I wrote over and over again,

"people live here, people live here."

"People live here."

And off on the Moon, it was written,

"No one lives here."

Often, the obvious things

aren't all that obvious
until you think about them.

Seeing anything
from a vast enough distance

changes everything,

as many astronauts have experienced.

And human eyes
have only ever seen our Earth

from as far as the Moon, really.

It's quite a ways further

before we get to the edges
of our own Solar System.

And even out to other stars,
to the constellations.

There is actually only one point
in the entire cosmos

that is present in all
constellations of stars,

and that presence is

here, planet Earth.

Those pictures we have made up
for the clusters of stars

only make sense from
this point of view down here.

Their stories only make sense
here on Earth.

And only something to us.

To people.

We are creatures of stories.

We are the stories we tell,

we're the stories we're told.

Consider briefly the story
of human civilization on Earth.

It tells of the ingenuity, elegance,

generous and nurturing nature of a species

that is also self-focused, vulnerable

and defiantly protective.

We, the people, shield
the flame of our existence

from the raw, vast elements
outside our control,

the great beyond.

Yet it is always to the flame we look.

"For all we know,"

when said as a statement,

it means the sum total of all knowledge.

But when said another way,

"for all we know,"

it means that we do not know at all.

This is the beautiful,
fragile drama of civilization.

We are the actors and spectators
of a cosmic play

that means the world to us here,

but means nothing anywhere else.

Possibly not even that much
down here, either.

If we truly thought about
our relationship with our boat,

with our Earth,

it might be more of a story
of ignorance and greed.

As is the case with Fausto,

a man who believed he owned everything

and set out to survey what was his.

He easily claims ownership of a flower,

a sheep, a tree and a field.

The lake and the mountain
prove harder to conquer,

but they, too, surrender.

It is in trying to own the open sea

where his greed proves his undoing,

when, in a fit of arrogance,

he climbs overboard
to show that sea who is boss.

But he does not understand,

slips beneath the waves,
sinks to the bottom.

The sea was sad for him

but carried on being the sea.

As do all the other objects
of his ownership,

for the fate of Fausto
does not matter to them.

For all the importance in the cosmos
we believe we hold,

we'd have nothing

if not for this Earth.

While it would keep happily spinning,

obliviously without us.

On this planet, there are people.

We have gone about our days,

sometimes we look up and out,

mostly we look down and in.

Looking up and by drawing lines
between the lights in the sky,

we've attempted to make
sense out of chaos.

Looking down, we've drawn lines
across the land to know where we belong

and where we don't.

We do mostly forget that these lines
that connect the stars

and those lines that divide the land

live only in our heads.

They, too, are stories.

We carry out our everyday
routines and rituals

according to the stories
we most believe in,

and these days, the story
is changing as we write it.

There is a lot of fear
in this current story,

and until recently,

the stories that seemed
to have the most power

are those of bitterness,

of how it had all gone wrong for us
individually and collectively.

It has been inspiring to watch
how the best comes from the worst.

How people are waking up
in this time of global reckoning

to the realization that our
connections with each other

are some of the most
important things we have.

But stepping back.

For all we've had to lament,

we spend very little time relishing
the single biggest thing

that has ever gone right for us.

That we are here in the first place,

that we are alive at all.

That we are still alive.

A million and a half years
after finding a box of matches,

we haven't totally burned the house down.

Yet.

The chances of being here
are infinitesimal.

Yet here we are.

Perils and all.

There have never been
more people living on Earth.

Using more stuff.

And it's become obvious
that many of the old systems

we invented for ourselves

are obsolete.

And we have to build new ones.

If it wasn't germs,

our collective fire
might suffocate us before long.

As we watch the wheels
of industry grind to a halt,

the machinery of progress become silent,

we have the wildest of opportunities

to hit the reset button.

To take a different path.

Here we are on Earth.

And life on Earth is a wonderful thing.

It looks big, this Earth,

but there are lots of us on here.

Seven and a half billion at last count,

with more showing up every day.

Even so,

there is still enough for everyone,

if we all share a little.

So please,

be kind.

When you think of it another way,

if Earth is the only place
where people live,

it's actually the least
lonely place in the universe.

There are plenty of people to be loved by

and plenty of people to love.

We need each other.

We know that now, more than ever.

Good night.