Whether or not I'm in it, a flight taking off will never not be miraculous to me, it will never not be the proof prodigious that human skill and ingenuity can work miracles.

We are insufficiently awed by such human-made miracles only because they have become so mundane and we have become too disenchanted. We need to actively fight against that. Because disenchantment is the beginning of despair. And all we have to do is pay attention, to attend to what we are experiencing, to avoid disenchantment.

As I take this picture I am flying in a weather controlled aluminum tube at hundreds of miles per hour thousands of feet in the air. As if that wasn't enough, I am chatting with my friends on the ground using a network supported by hundreds, thousands, of satellites going around our planet, those incredible bundles of software and hardware that we strapped on the back of rockets (rockets!) and sent into space. And again, as if that wasn't enough, I am typing this on a device that has more computing power than was available to the Apollo missions that landed on the moon (we landed on the moon!). The source of that computing power is silicon, which we get from Earth's crust -- in a literal way we figured out a way to make rocks perform computation.

All of this is magic we made ourselves.

It wasn't revealed to us. We wrested the esoteric secret knowledge from the dark smog of ignorance that had surrounded us ever since the dawn of humanity. This is what progress is. And the progress is not just technological. My flight is a full flight, being flown by an all-female crew, full of the incredible human diversity. The fact that we all agree that we are, as individuals, equal in some deeper sense despite our real and perceived differences along racial, religious, gender, economic, and sexual axes is a relatively recent development, barely decades old. And this is progress, too, this is magical, too. How dare we let our disenchanted eyes glaze over miracles staring in our face? How dare we doubt those miracles?

How dare we be suspicious of our capabilities to materialize those miracles?

Every time a flight takes off, it's not just defying gravity, no. It is telling us that we developed the capability to defy gravity. It is telling us that, using our ingenuity, we have overcome a seemingly insurmountable barrier placed on us. The wonders of antibiotics, agriculture, and Enlightenment are all telling us that. To deny our capacity for such wonders is to deny ourselves the fundamental truth that progress is our nature, not mere happenstance. This is the essence of being human.

How dare we doubt the very essence of what it means to be human? How dare we despair?

We must not.

Instead, we must dare to soar because it is woven into our being. We must dare to believe in our potential again because disbelief is surrender. To give in to despair or to shrink from our potential is the true betrayal, the true abandonment of the miracles we have fought tooth and nail to make real. The project that has lifted us from earth to sky, from sickness to health, from barbarism to civilization, from darkness to light, is cosmic in scope. And its importance insists that it cannot be anything less than a human project.