facing extinction with a muffin and a cup of tea

My eldest daughter (and so, by association, my youngest daughter), are all into dinosaurs at the moment. Their drawings are of diplodocus, their games about T-rex's and triceratops. When swimming, they are not dolphins but plesiosaurs and nothosaurs.
We talk about extinction. How the dinosaurs world radically changed, but also how (besides for that last big meteorite - bam!), it took hundreds of years to do so, and in fact the age of the dinosaur was just one in a series of prehistoric developmental stages of earth.

I believe in Earth. I have faith in the forces of nature and the slow and continuous progress of evolution. I believe that Earth has the bigger picture, that it teaches us lessons in transience and perspective and scale.

Climate change. The end of antibiotics. Anti-vaxxers. Avian flu. War. Super power ridiculousness. Civilian revolt. The death of the oceans.

Human beings are just one more developmental stage in the glorious story that is Earth. Our time will come to an end, to make way for another species or manifestation of ourselves, they will learn from our mistakes and benefit from our successes.
Just as we've learned from the dinosaurs not to be so ... big.

And when we're gone, the tides will keep on turning, the winds blowing and the earth shifting. Creatures will evolve and breed and die and mutate, and we're damn arrogant to think we've been the greatest of them all.

But right now I've got applesauce muffins in the oven, a lovely cup of tea, a weekend ahead with my beloveds, a party tonight to celebrate the current clean bill of health of this friend.
And all that is pretty damn great.