I suppose now that, in my youthful naiveté, I had assumed that the visualisation of our home as a globe of fixed dimensions would inevitably trigger a paradigm shift in how we might live our lives: that as an intelligent species we would use the robust science that explains the workings of our world to secure our long term future on a finite surface.

Two years later, I used the photo as the catalyst for my final-year undergraduate seminar on the rapidly evolving understanding of our relationship with our planet.

While at the time both were clearly differently momentous events, in retrospect the visit to the moon did not really jolt my perception of life on Earth until I hung on my wall a poster of this iconic photo of the earthrise taken by one of the astronauts, Bill Anders. Within 6 months, I had knocked back an opportunity to go to Woodstock, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had landed on the moon. In 1968, we also gathered in front of the TV for the broadcast by the crew of Apollo 8 who were in orbit around the moon, the first humans to visit another celestial body. On Long Island, New York, where I lived as an adolescent and young adult, my family always spent Christmas Eve with our dearest friends, drinking eggnog and carol singing, sometimes having walked through the snow to get there. For me, this year has stirred the ghost of a Christmas past that helps me understand the present, and offers a guide to the future. The past 14 months have given us a jolting reminder of our entanglement in the complexities of the ever-changing natural world, and as health workers, we may well be wondering what the future holds for our work and our communities. SUMMER holidays are for pondering the past and preparing for the future.Īt the end of every year, many of us reflect on the events of the previous year and sometimes hark back to simpler times.

The pale blue dot