FINDING HOPE IN SPACE AND ANTIQUE SHOPS - Sarah James

I received a New Year’s card which read, “The universe expands infinitely. May this bring you hope for endless possibilities.” It was a beautiful card, but it didn’t bring me hope. I found its message unsettling. I once heard Stephen Hawking speak about the possibility of a catastrophic asteroid hitting Earth, but I told myself I wouldn’t worry about asteroids. Since anything from whipped cream containers to cancer can kill you on this planet, I already had enough existential angst. 

Some scientists estimate that there are as many grains of sand on Earth as there are stars in the sky, but, of course, neither grains of sand nor stars can be precisely counted. The unfathomable size of the universe often terrifies me. Thinking about the universe expanding, or light-years, or planets with frozen lakes and dust storms, or space debris, can feel like staring into the abyss. 

My husband, Jack, in contrast, wanted to be an astronaut as a child and studied science in college, not literature, as I did. He is amazed by the intricacies and majesty of the universe, wanting to know the details of these vast realities. I find these things beautiful, too, in a poetic sense, but mostly, I’d rather focus on the life right in front of me.

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Jack and I have been isolated together for nearly one year to the day. For one of our last outings before the pandemic, we visited a local antique store. We walked through the small space, which was once a house over a century ago. It was filled to the brim with candle boxes, Christening gowns, and gourds. I loved the immediacy and tangibility of the history. Touching an object once held every day by some other person centuries before was enlivening to me. It reminded me how human beings carry on through grief, hardship, illness, disruption…and how fleeting life actually is. 

The owner, Anna, told us she was carrying on the business to honor her husband who passed suddenly only a few months earlier. He was the real history buff, she said, but she couldn’t let the shop go. She showed me her wedding announcement, which she kept stapled to the wall next to the cash register. “He adores you,” she said with a smile, gesturing toward Jack.

We didn’t know then that we were all perched on the precipice of a pandemic. Jack and I didn’t know that Anna’s thoughts on grief were prescient, too. Jack would lose his mother within months. We didn’t know that we were in for a year of navigating loss, illness, hardship, disruption, and trying to locate hope together. 

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In between blocks of working from home, Jack asked me to watch the NASA Mars Perseverance Rover landing with him. We waited, as a young woman reported the rover’s precise statistics, its velocity, its distance from the surface of Mars, et cetera. I held my breath. To my surprise, I was gripped, and tears collected in the corners of my eyes. 

The rover landed, and the NASA observation room erupted into celebration. They cheered, clapped, raised their hands in the air, and fist-bumped each other. Beyond the astronomical feat, it was an expression of radical hope, in a time which we all very much need to witness hope.   

Emily Dickinson called hope “the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul – and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.” Is hope a feeling? Or a belief? Or an expression of love? An aspiration? A way to live your life? Naivete? Resilience? All of the above? 

I expect the Mars rover landing represents different forms of hope to different kinds of people. Perhaps, existential hope, to some, of life beyond our planet. 

I, the woman who loves exploring how people lived and the romantic patina of candle boxes, find comfort in seeing human beings forge ahead into the unknown. 

We are always forging ahead, enduring plagues, wars, grief, and inequality. And we have always looked upward and pursued mysterious things. These varied hopes link us to the past, the future, and, most of all, to each other.

Sarah James is a graduate of Middlebury College and Yale Divinity School. Her writing appears in Earth & Altar, Darling, and Patheos.