So I visited the Musée d’Orsay and whilst looking at a beautiful desert scene ‘Le Sahara’  by Gustave Guillaumet I entered into a brief conversation with a women from the East coast of America and I remarked, ‘it makes you think, doesn’t it?’ ‘Yes’, she replied, ‘that there is something bigger than us’. ‘For me it’s the weight of our common humanity’, I said. She’d moved a little and didn’t hear me.

Later I revisited the moment and despite feeling both humbled and invigorated by a star filled night sky, hoping that one day we can explore there, I knew that the bigger thing for all of us at the moment is our immediate, fragile and dangerous human condition.  When looking to the stars, we should realise that we need to look after each other, or we will never reach our true transcendent potential; we need to invest in our common humanity.