Hibernation

Just thinking about how some bears hibernate over the winter, and how that resembles what I tend to want to do when I exceed the threshold of anxiety I can handle. Sleeping or otherwise resting can really help bring my anxiety down to a manageable level, though at some point I do actually have to look at the underlying causes of the anxiety, some of which are clearer or more directly addressable than others.

Space and Politics

One thing I maintain is that space exploration and science, as detached as it may seem from the affairs of this world, is actually very political.  Anything with any kind of goals is political.  The questions of who should be researching space, what they should research, and what kind of resources they should be given access to are all questions with political implications.  There's also no such thing as a truly apolitical person, because the purpose of politics is to determine what goals to achieve and how to go about achieving them, and people without goals simply don't exist (even not wanting to do anything is a goal).  Space science is also incredibly relevant to our modern world, and I think it's shortsighted to ignore it as unimportant and completely inaccurate to characterize any aspect of space exploration and science as not having any sort of political implications. 

Politics and Space

One thing that causes me a great deal of apprehension is that the people who have the most power over how resources for space science are allocated tend to see space as a tool for them to dominate the rest of humanity, whereas a lot of the people I've encountered who actually would like the world to be a better place and are concerned with the politics of how to achieve that think space is something we should ignore until and unless we've actually fixed our other problems.  I think both of these mindsets are bad, and I think the interactions between these mindsets are going to have bad results.