'My climate change' - Andrew Revkin

Some things just seem too momentous to keep in mind. One is the planet we’re living on. We’re on the third rock from the sun twenty-four hours a day, but I’ve only been to one place where that awareness is enforced by nature. Squatting on a floe of eight-foot-thick sea ice at the North Pole, drifting on the 14,300-foot-deep Arctic Ocean hundreds of miles from land, with everything in every direction south and the sun circling the horizon, you absolutely feel you are on a planet.

Another momentous thing we hardly ever think about is the thing we think with: the brain. I think about mine now quite a bit, ever since a hot July day in 2011 when my eyes started telling me conflicting stories about the nature of the world as I huffed and strained to keep up with my far fitter son running up a steep trail in the woods near my home.

My left eye told me the world was paisley. The right eye insisted all was well. I called out; we returned home. I took a shower and some aspirin, wondering if I could be having a stroke. My son drove me to the hospital. It wasn’t a stroke . . . yet.

Read “My Climate Change” by Andrew Revkin.

(Andrew C. Revkin is senior fellow for environmental understanding at Pace University’s Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies and the author of the Dot Earth blog at the New York Times).