Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday. It's the last week of Pizzamas. That means there's only a few more days to get your Pizzamas stuff at pizzamas.com, including all of our amazing t-shirts and this super snuggly blanket and this color-changing mug. By the way, we now have some discount bundles including the Cozy Bundle which includes this blanket and the mug for $30 off.

Okay, Hank, so full disclosure: I'm anxious, so let's go outside because it does actually help me to like touch grass and be amid trees. It's so weird to me how much life there is on earth. Like, this is life. This is life. This is life. You made a TikTok once where you pointed out that humans have relatively brief lifespans and our species hasn't been around for that long, but if we think of ourselves as part of one continuous biological phenomenon called life, then things start to look quite different because life on Earth has existed continuously for about 3.7 billion years, which is around 23% of the history of the entire universe. So like, we are young and most species we currently share the planet with are fairly young, like, even the tuatara—which existed before the emergence of large dinosaurs—is only around 250 million years old, which is less than 10% of the history of life on Earth. So yeah, we're new. Most other things that we see are new, but life is very old—and I do find that a little comforting.

But when you're walking through an urban-ish forest, you don't only see life, of course. You also see steel husks and concrete structures that were once used to house barrels of whiskey during Prohibition. This forest used to be private property owned by Albert Lieber who made and lost a fortune selling booze and who was also the grandfather of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut. And we're in a city, so the human-shaped world is everywhere even in the forest from the invasive Ivy to the extraordinarily polluted White River. There's no full separation between these worlds. Not really. We try to claim that this is artificial and this is natural, but concrete and steel are made out of Earth, just like everything else is.

Alright, I'm starting to breathe a little easier. I'm part of a continuous process of life that stretches back a quarter of the way to the beginning of time and I'm in a world. I'm walking. This is a good place to be all things considered. It's a good Earth. My friend Henry in Sierra Leone likes to say that when he sees beauty or goodness in the world, that he is encouraged. So yeah, I'm feeling encouraged.

One nice thing about Indianapolis in October: The leaves are starting to fall. If you pitch this idea to someone who'd never been to Earth, I think they would find it phenomenally beautiful. So each cycle, we would explain to these non-Earth folk, each cycle it gets colder in parts of our world as we tilt away from our star and our most numerous and visually prominent lifeforms which are called "Trees" simultaneously change. The fluttering, soft, green appendages at the end of these trees are called leaves and these leaves erupt into bright colors that we associate with our star. Reds, oranges, yellows, and then huge swaths of leaves fall to the ground until the ground is covered with them. The trees spend the cold months without their leaves and then, as our Earth begins to tilt back toward its star, the trees regrow their leaves. This goes on, growing and falling, growing and falling, for dozens or even hundreds of cycles. It goes on for so long that leaves dropped by young trees may in time become soil that helps support that same tree as it gets older. In a very real way, our trees are nourished by what they let go of by what they leave behind. What an encouragement I find that to be.

Hank, I'll see you tomorrow.