"Overwhelming, if you will"

22 February 2021: "Imagine yourself sitting on the surface of Mars and listening to the surroundings. It's cool, really neat. Overwhelming, if you will." --Dave Gruel, one of the engineers for Perseverance, describing hearing the first ever recorded sound from Mars. 

Two overwhelming stories in today's news. First, the sounds and images from Mars. It's a story that  conjurers words (some of them conflicting) like pride, awe, joy, loneliness. Sometimes I struggle to even imagine Mars, but here it is, on video. And we can hear it, this place we've never been. 

Second: 500,000 COVID deaths in the US. I remember so clearly saying to some friends (via videochat, of course), "Eight thousand Americans--gone! How do you make sense of that?" And here we are at half a million. And it didn't have to be this way.

I guess these stories both make me feel so small, but in different ways. Overwhelming.