For me … it’s books!! I guess because they teach me and they take me to so many different places!! …
“Stars represent more than possibility to me; they are probability. On Earth the odds could seem stacked against me – but where you are changes everything. Each star was, and still is, another chance for me to find myself somewhere else. Somewhere new.” – Sara Seager, The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir (Crown, August 18, 2020).
There’s a famous play, Equus, about a troubled boy with a blinding love of horses. The boy sees a psychiatrist named Martin Dysart, who tries to understand him by trying to understand his love. Dysart is confounded by it:
A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs—it sucks—it strokes its eyes over the whole uncountable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start they were ever magnetized at all—just those particular moments of experience and no others—I don’t know.
I can trace my love, too. Why stars instead of horses, or boys, or hockey? I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because the stars are the antithesis of darkness, of abusive stepfathers…
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It Is What It Is 