Member-only story
The Overview Effect
If nothing matters, then everything does: A six-month space exploration through the depths of depression and back.
I remember sitting in Paris with a Filipino nun at a cafe patio outside the Cathedral of Notre Dame after 8 a.m. mass, enjoying a croissant and an espresso, chatting mostly in broken Spanish about god and colonialism. It was August. A Sunday. Pigeons clucked and hounded us for crumbs.
I was alone — somewhere near the beginning of a 23-day mad-dash through 10 cities on 3 continents. She asked if I had stopped believing in god, why would I go to mass?
I’d woken up at 6 a.m. that morning, the overcast light of the sunrise enticed me to lace up my sneakers and go for a run. I hadn’t so much journeyed to the Cathedral so much as I just happened to pass it by on my way to nowhere in particular. I walked inside because, well, it’s just what you do. It just so happened that mass started in five minutes.
“I was in the neighborhood. I doubt I’ll ever have the chance to do it again. Belief or not, it is still my culture (I grew up Catholic on both sides of my family, with a whole contingent of French immigrants on one of them), and it felt right.”
I felt at home in a house of worship for the first time in half my life. I felt at…
