=1 "Astrogation"
 |
 |
|
Astrogation
- “Consider the universe and know
- that it is your home.”
When your own sun, the sun of your childhood, has disappeared into a little point of light among innumerable other little points of light, and you seem to be suspended, immobile, in emptiness because your movement is too slight to be detected by your senses; when the nearest stars are still light years away and the spaces around you too immense for any human sense of orientation and you are all alone, then is the time to have faith, faith in yourself and in the destination towards which you voyage.
There is nothing to show you that your ship is moving along a vast curve of the universe or through a tremendous shortcut of spacetime. There is nobody to speak to, nobody to help you if something happens. There are only the stars around you, and even the nearest one is light years away. That is the moment to have faith in yourself.
You know that in spite of appearances you are advancing with cosmic speed toward your goal and that nothing can happen to you. Even if you fall, you can fall only towards your destination. That is the law of space. You have no decision to make, only to let yourself be carried along, only to surrender to that programme which has sped you on your way since the distant beginning of your journey. And even if you forget where to go, your ship will remember.
All around you are stars. Look! that beautiful violet one! Perhaps there is your landing strip? It is still a point, but by tomorrow it may be a little disc, and then a sun, a solar system awaiting you.
There are millions of little points of light scattered through the black velvet of space. From one of them you have come, to one of them you are going. Does it matter to which one?
Don't they all consist of the same hydrogen as the body of your home sun, as your own body? The same elements of carbon, hydrogen, iron, oxygen and phosophorus which compose your body and your spaceship you will find wherever you go in the universe. Because the universe is one.
And then you remember gratefully that wherever you are in the universe, there you are at home. Because you are a child of the universe, and the universe is your mother.