Thankful

I try to remind myself regularly how incredibly fortunate I really am. With all the stress of daily life, I often forget this fact, but it remains a fact nonetheless. I won't list here all the things for which I'm grateful, because I'd still be writing come the New Year, but I will say that most of all I want to thank all the people in my life for making my existence richer.

Each moment affords us the chance to find joy, but it's up to us to take those chances. In my Jon & Lobo books, Jon often muses on this very topic when he is about to go through a jump gate aperture, as he does in this small snippet from the end of chapter 7 of Overthrowing Heaven.

The lavender edges of the aperture through which we were jumping filled the edges of the image. The center was the unblemished black of every aperture on every gate in the universe, the perfect absence of light. Energy passed harmlessly through the apertures as if they weren’t there. Matter, however, behaved entirely differently: Anything that entered an aperture emerged into another area of space, typically one many light years away. Each aperture linked exactly two points, and those points never changed. A single gate might have one or many apertures; the more connections to other systems, the more important a trade center the planet near that gate became. No one knew how the gates worked or what made them appear, but every time we found a new one, right nearby we always found a planet suitable for human life.

I’d jumped hundreds of times, and each time the experience moved me. A vital part of the fabric that held together the far-flung human species, the jump gates managed to feel both effortlessly natural and somehow deeply wrong. I wondered if early air travelers felt the same way about airplanes.

The ship in front of us vanished through the aperture, and its perfect blackness completely filled the display. All that we could see, everything in front of us, was impossibly pure nothingness, no hint as to our future, no evidence of material for creating that future, just an emptiness, and in the moment before we entered it I silently wished, as I always did, that what awaited us would offer hope and opportunity and the possibility of joy.

We jumped.

We're all jumping all the time, moving from one point in space to another, diving into the unknowable future, and the possibility of joy awaits us all. I hope you find it tonight, tomorrow, and in all the days ahead.