My family and I have big plans for this weekend. We head to the local pharmacy to pick up her latest COVID-19 booster and flu shot. Go home and toast to good health with Smartwater and Gatorade to avoid the worst vaccine-induced hangover.

And from autumn to winter, I will do my best, believing in the universe.

Most of the advice I give myself, and anyone willing to listen, these days is just to “trust the universe.” That’s not to say I believe everything is destined to be satisfying in the end. But all I worry about is the darkest and most wasteful part of my life. I understand perfectly well that there is no, but a lot of my time is spent hopping back and forth between these two imaginary realms. I know that total submission to things is the only way. Especially in this time of heightened tension and anxiety.

Unfortunately, there is a big difference between really knowing something and knowing it “intelligently”. It’s like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug, to paraphrase Mark Twain.

As we watched a room full of space scientists explode Monday night in celebration of the demise of our $325 million spacecraft, we thought about trusting in the universe, in the literal sense of the word. rice field. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, at about 15,000 miles per hour, met the surface of her 11 billion-pound asteroid known as Dimorphos, ending its 10-month space journey as planned.

In some ways, the test mission was the product of a fundamental mistrust of the universe.One day, a giant boulder would set its sights on Mother Earth, and a team of geniuses in blue polo shirts could tell the difference between a close call and a global catastrophe. It may become..

But in another, larger sense, astrophysicists trust the universe to a depth that I cannot comprehend. The universe is going to do what the universe is going to do, DART program or not. Ultimately all we can do is fully embrace our place and time in the world, not just our abilities. All rocket scientists, reporters and receptionists owe the universe are our existence and authenticity.

To that end, earlier this month I returned to my local public library for the first time since the pandemic closed the building two and a half years ago. It’s a small gesture, but the last time I wrote for publication before the pandemic changed everything was finishing a great novel from the library while my daughters slept during the school holidays. The column introduced the girls to one of the most moving scenes from Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West” and explained how a shared grief brings us all together. “Surrendering myself to other people’s stories, I wrote at the time, “takes off the burden of my story and feels a kind of freedom.”

Reading fiction is one of the best ways to train your empathy skills, but during the pandemic we inexplicably turned away from those exercises when we needed it most. As a result, I became weak. I became more worried, stopped giving myself free rein to other people’s stories, and was paralyzed by the weight of my own story.

I stopped trusting the universe – as I understand it now – and gave up the freedom that trust created. Renewing your library card will definitely help.