Vox Meditantis

How much would you pay to go to the moon?

Saturday, 25th October 2025

The question arrived with morning light the sort that makes harbour water look coin-bright, as though the Delaware itself were weighing value. How much would you pay to go to the moon?

I stood at the window with tea cooling in my hands, watching gulls argue over territory near the pier, and thought about cost. Not the tidy arithmetic of currency, but the harder sums we negotiate when desire meets the limits of what we can bear to spend.

The Calculations We Avoid

Yesterday’s reflections still hummed beneath the surface – alternative doors, latticed futures, the museum pilot and culinary circles, all those adjacent possibilities I’d sketched as though vocation could be redistributed like furniture. But the moon prompt asks something more elemental. It asks what I’d surrender not to rearrange my life, but to transcend it entirely.

The mechanic I saw on Friday spoke about hands gone clean, identity dissolving when work disappeared. I wonder if astronauts experience the inverse – returning to Earth only to find themselves perpetually displaced, no longer entirely here once they’ve been irrevocably there.

Father Walsh caught me during our Saturday harbour walk, earlier than usual. He’d noticed my abstraction, asked where I’d gone. “The moon,” I said, which made him smile. He pointed to the pale crescent still visible against morning blue and said that Saint Francis called it Sister Moon – neither distant nor cold, but kin. “How much to visit family?” he asked. “Everything and nothing, depending on who’s asking.”

The Price of Elsewhere

Here’s what I know professionally, from thirty years of listening: most people who fantasise about escape aren’t fleeing to something, but from. The moon becomes metaphor – for starting over, for shedding accumulated weight, for the radical severance that promises relief from who we’ve become.

But I’ve also sat with those who’ve attempted such departures. Geographic cures, we call them in the profession. New cities, new relationships, new careers pursued with the fervour of conversion. And what they discover, inevitably, is that the self travels with them. That wherever you go, there you are – still carrying the same tender places, the same unresolved questions, the same need for connection that no amount of distance alters.

Would I pay to go to the moon? Perhaps the better question is: what would such a journey cost me beyond the ticket price?

What I’d Leave Behind

This morning, Marcus had my coffee waiting before I reached the counter. “You look thoughtful,” he said. “Lunar,” I answered, which earned me a puzzled smile and an extra biscuit. These small economies of attention – the way Elena saves fennel she knows I’ll use, the way Dan shelves books he thinks might interest me, the way Tom notes my walking patterns and adjusts his harbour reports accordingly – constitute a gravity I’ve been decades building.

To go to the moon would mean leaving this web of care, this intricate scaffolding of mutual witness. Not forever, perhaps, but long enough to sever certain threads that only hold when attended. Long enough for patterns to shift, for people to recalibrate their days without accounting for my presence.

I thought about David, who stayed Thursday evening washing dishes with the concentration of someone performing a sacrament. We didn’t speak much – just the comfortable quiet of two people learning each other’s rhythms through shared domestic tasks. Before he left, he asked if I’d like to attempt cooking together next week. “Your risotto, my inadequate knife skills,” he offered. The vulnerability in his humour was unmistakable.

What would it cost to pursue the moon whilst tentatively learning whether this careful-handed man might become more than pleasant adjacency? Timing, certainly. Presence, absolutely. The fragile trust that requires showing up consistently, especially in the early stages when intimacy is still testing whether it’s safe to take root.

The Currency of Courage

Jenny met me for lunch at the small café overlooking the river – the one that’s survived three ownership changes and still makes proper tea. I posed the question to her: “How much would you pay to go to the moon?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Nothing. I’m afraid of heights, Catherine, and the moon is all height with nowhere to hide.” Then, being Jenny, she turned it back on me. “But you’re not asking about literal rockets, are you? You’re asking about the cost of attempting something extraordinary when ordinary life is finally starting to feel like it might be enough.”

She knows me too well, this friend from primary school who’s watched me construct careful distance for decades.

“Here’s my question,” she continued, stirring honey into her tea with the precision she brings to library cataloguing. “Would going to the moon make you braver, or is it just a grander way of remaining hidden? Because you’re already doing the brave thing, Catherine. You signed up for watercolours. You invited David to the concert. You agreed to Maggie’s oral history interview. Those aren’t moon missions, but they’re your moon missions. And they’re happening here, where people can actually witness them.”

The Mathematics of Meaning

This afternoon I walked the harbour’s full circuit, past the renovated warehouses where Priya’s architectural firm has offices, past the Historical Society where Maggie was likely cataloguing something, past the community centre where Tuesday evening I’ll attempt watercolours with entirely wrong brushes and appropriate humility.

The October light was doing its gold-hour alchemy, making everything briefly luminous. I thought about Mothers things upstairs – her Nevada postcards, her maps marked with routes driven on impulse. She’d have said yes to the moon without calculating cost, would’ve arrived with wrong equipment and charmed the astronauts into helping her sort it.

But Mother also chose to stay. Chose Father, chose New Corinth, chose the dailiness of civic connection over the perpetual novelty she might’ve pursued. That decision – to plant rather than drift – wasn’t capitulation. It was its own form of courage, the kind that builds something rather than merely experiencing it.

What the Moon Costs Those Who Stay

Here’s what nobody mentions in these thought experiments: the cost isn’t only borne by those who go. Every departure – whether to the moon or Quebec or some other attempt at elsewhere – extracts payment from those who remain.

I think of my patients, the young woman learning to hold my gaze, Michael navigating retirement’s unstructured hours, the teenager whose silence I’ve learned to read like weather. What would my absence cost them? Not because I’m irreplaceable – I’m not – but because therapeutic relationships depend on constancy, on the patient knowledge that next week will bring the same room, the same chair, the same steady attention.

And what of the lattice I sketched yesterday? The museum pilot, the culinary circles, the community college seminars – all those adjacent doors require presence. They’re invitations to show up, repeatedly, building something across time rather than launching once and landing transformed.

The Value Proposition

So how much would I pay to go to the moon? In financial terms, nothing I possess could purchase such passage, which renders the question safely hypothetical.

But if we’re speaking metaphorically – how much would I pay to escape gravity, to transcend the accumulated weight of being known, to start fresh where no one requires me to be anyone in particular?

The answer shifts depending on when you ask. At thirty, perhaps everything. At forty, still too much. But at fifty-eight, having finally begun the difficult work of risking ordinary intimacy, of signing up for beginners’ classes and inviting careful-handed men to concerts and agreeing to be interviewed rather than interviewing – at fifty-eight, I find the moon’s appeal diminished.

Not because I’ve stopped longing for transcendence. The hunger for something beyond this careful life hasn’t disappeared. But I’m beginning to understand what Helen modelled across forty years: that the most profound transformations often look like staying. Like showing up to the same room, the same people, the same unglamorous work of being present until, accumulated across decades, that constancy creates something no single spectacular gesture could match.

The Astronomy of Here

This evening I prepared the lemon-fennel risotto again – muscle memory now, the way brown butter announces itself, the patience of adding stock one ladle at a time. I cooked enough for two and walked it three doors down to Tom, whose hip has been troubling him more this week.

He accepted the covered dish with characteristic brevity, but his eyes held that particular warmth that means the gesture registered. “Moon’s waxing,” he said, nodding toward the harbour where twilight was gathering. “Be full by week’s end. Good for seeing what’s always been there.”

Back in my flat, I stood at the window watching light drain from the sky, the harbour settling into its evening rhythms. The moon – that slender crescent from this morning – had disappeared into dusk, but I knew it was there. Orbiting faithfully, exerting its pull on tides and imagination both, close enough to see yet forever unreachable.

How much would I pay to go? Perhaps the question misunderstands the transaction. Because the moon offers no destination, only distance. And what I’m learning, slowly, at fifty-eight, is that I’ve spent enough years practising distance. What I need now – what costs more courage than any rocket – is learning to stay. To be here, fully here, in this harbour town with its accumulated kindnesses and its careful-handed men and its Tuesday evening art classes. To risk being seen not from the safety of professional remove, but up close, in the unforgiving light that reveals all our ordinary insufficiencies.

That costs everything. But unlike passage to the moon, it’s a price I might actually manage to pay – one small, terrestrial gesture at a time, staying put whilst everything in me wants to launch toward some distant, impossible elsewhere.

The harbour keeps its counsel. Tomorrow Father Walsh and I will walk our usual route, and I’ll attend the Sunday river clean-up, and Monday will bring its familiar therapeutic hours. No moon missions. Just the patient work of remaining, of learning to call this gravity home rather than constraint.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.