We want something like this to have meaning.

I look up at the night sky from my porch, where two of the brightest lights in the sky are now one on the shortest day of the year. Hundreds of years have passed since something like this was visible, and hundreds more will pass before it is visible again.

It’s in our nature to look for meaning in things.

Surely such a heavenly ballet arriving perfectly-timed after a year of both calamity and hope must bring with it greater meaning and purpose. We want to make it a sign, but a sign of what? Deepening apocalypse as we slide, greased, toward the abyss of the Great Filter. Dawn and new light breaking, as we haul ourselves up, bruised but not broken by the trauma.

Perhaps the most devastating thought of all is that it may mean nothing.

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