November, we are almost at the end of the year. We have mentally prepared ourselves for the festive month. The children have mainly been thinking about the presents they want, and Alan has made quite a list, carefully planning which gifts are for his birthday, which ones Santa should bring, and what he wants from the Three Kings next year.

This month, as almost every month, we did another nature route. With a slightly larger group of men, we went once again to enjoy meat in its purest form accompanied by a couple of glasses of nice wine. Also this month I was the only one who enjoyed a day off, because in Telde (where I work) some saint was commemorated. The rest of the month we had creativity, happyness, ninja activities and even some worries, so it was once again a month with lots of emotions.

It’s hard sometimes to see the bigger picture. To realize that you’re not the center of the world. Worse still, all the problems we all face are ultimately negligibly small. The Earth, a tiny speck spinning around a slightly larger glowing speck, somewhere in a corner of an unimaginably vast space.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

The soccer season has started again for Alan, so we’re back on the field every weekend. It was also the month when I could finally let go of my battery worries, and of course, the highlight of the month, we’ve been married for 15 years!