My son, who is almost four, has recently become obsessed with the universe. He can recite the planets of the solar system and tell anyone who will listen that Pluto – his favourite – was once a planet but was reclassified as a “dwarf planet” in 2006.
Now that he has a sense of scale and size, he has developed a habit of comparing everything: an ant is smaller than a leaf, the Earth is smaller than the sun, the sun is just a dot in the galaxy, and the galaxy is a tiny part of the universe.
“And we are the people on Earth,” he said one evening as we looked at a picture of the Milky Way. “So we are very small. We are like ants.” His logic was impeccable. His conclusion was unexpectedly philosophical.
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Being a mother is a process of growing together with your children: discovering how their fresh eyes can become our own source of enlightenment. A simple idea from a child can unlock a perspective we, as adults, have forgotten.
My son’s intuition – that human beings are small and vulnerable – has never felt more painfully true than it does today.
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As 2025 draws to a close, the global landscape is scarred by crises whose scale dwarfs individual lives. Armed conflicts, humanitarian catastrophes and geopolitical confrontation have all made individuals feel smaller than ever, as if ordinary people are merely specks, swept aside by the shifting plates of power.