Hey there, it's Major.

As we take a look back at the slowdown's deep well of episodes,

we're revisiting some standout moments from past hosts.

Today, we're going into the vault to bring you an episode from Tracy K. Smith,

one of the voices that helped shape the slowdown into what it is today.

This is just one of the many special selections from our archives.

I'm Tracy K. Smith, and this is The slowdown.

How can everything be?

How is it possible?

And how can we know so little of what that everything is and of the why that set it and us into motion?

Maybe to be alive is a matter of accepting that such answers do not concern us. Maybe being alive in matter is a matter of learning to hear and see and feel and trust and to love all that is available to us. Do you think the things out

beyond us, like the stars or the wind in space, or the purpose around which a black hole churns,

do you think any of that understands us? If there were more time, if I didn't have to do a job

or take care of a family, would I spend my days asking these kinds of questions? Would I stretch my small human mind

until it could offer up its own system of logic and belief? What I tell the story of the

mountains and the trees and the night sky, the way humans did before mortgages and professional

ambition kicked in.

If there were more time and more freedom, we'd still spend time trying to find ways to name

the many different kinds of love we feel. We'd still invent wishes and invoke magic and whisper

prayers as ways of protecting the people we love.

We'd summon nightmares as containers for our worry.

And the true poets among us, maybe the children, would look out at what surrounds us

...