In Light-Years There's No Hurry: Cosmic Perspectives on Everyday Life
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A New Scientist Best Popular Science Book of 2023
How seeing Earth through the eyes of an astronaut brings new wonder and meaning to life on our planet.
One stifling summer night, the poet and journalist Marjolijn van Heemstra lay awake, unable to sleep—like so many of us feeling anxious and alienated, deeply exhausted yet restless. Amid the suffocating stream of daily obligations, the clamor of notifications and increasingly dismal headlines, she longed for a way to rise above the frenzy, for a renewed sense of meaning and connection. Then she learned about the overview effect—a permanent shift in consciousness many astronauts experience when beholding Earth from outside the atmosphere—and wondered: could the perspective of outer space offer the internal space she sought?
The lyrical account of van Heemstra’s yearlong quest to experience the overview effect on Earth, In Light-Years There’s No Hurry invites us to lift our gaze above eye level and discover our connections with the cosmos, our planet, and each other. We follow as van Heemstra’s cosmic awareness expands and she finds herself feeling simultaneously lighter and more grounded. Compared with the complexity of the universe, daily life on Earth begins to seem more manageable, while understanding the improbability of our collective existence gives her new patience and tenderness for her neighbors. The grand rhythms of light-years and eons become a source of restoration and relief—a comforting, necessary reminder to slow down and zoom out.
Contemplating the solace a cosmic perspective offers in our chaotic, divided world, In Light-Years There’s No Hurry is a moving meditation on what it is to be human amid the vastness of the universe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and journalist van Heemstra (In Search of a Name) brings cosmology down to earth in this delightful take on enlarging one's perspective. On a hot summer night in 2019, a sleepless and existentially anxious van Heemstra was doomscrolling through her phone when a picture taken by the Hubble Telescope popped into her feed and seized her imagination as "the most beautiful vista I know." This moment kickstarted her quest to understand what she came to know as "the overview effect," or the transcendent shift in perspective of astronauts after they've looked down at Earth. With a poet's eye and a scientist's empirical persistence, van Heemstra interviewed astrophysicists, engineers, and even a theologian who helped her understand "the profound awareness that we live in a, statistically speaking, negligible planet in an unfathomable universe." Meanwhile, the author's daily life continued, and she attempted to see interactions with her partner, children, and neighbors from a new vantage point, concluding that space "is not above us. The universe surrounds us, is within us," and that cosmic vastness can shed light on social divisiveness, because "if we take a step back, we see how amazing it is that we even exist at all to have these disagreements." The author's curious, investigative spirit and lyrical prose enchants. Fans of Rebecca Solnit will love this.
