What was in her backpack?

I cried for the first time in 20 years this morning.

An eight-year-old girl was killed by a mortar in Ukraine.

There was a picture of her and her family splayed across the pavement. Their dog — in a crate — still barking. They were actively attempting to flee their city, suitcases in hand, desperate and hopeful.

The girl had a bright winter jacket and a colorful backpack — one just like my own daughter’s. For that, I have a bias in these emotions. A bias I wish, more than anything, upon the current world order.

Did the girl brush her hair and put a bow in it that morning? What was in the backpack? Did she hug her favorite stuffy before putting it in, promising to keep it safe? Did she have a notebook with drawings and stickers in it?

Did she think she might get blown up today?

We exist as a freckle within an unimaginable plane of time, living on a planet that’s the tiniest mote of existence within an infinite universe and, yet, we’ve found a reason to fight over dirt.

Hopelessness overcame me this morning. As I was crying, my dog came to me and I scruffed his head. He loves me. Unconditionally. And, like the dog in the crate, he has no sense of mortars, internal bleeding, or bright winter jackets on dead 8-year-old girls. He just loves.

There’s some innate sense of duty in me to take up arms and fight — though, isn’t that the same primal brain soup that started this? I don’t know.

What I do know is that in the face of grown adults blowing up kids, the thing that I can do, right now, that can actually effect change in the world, is to love more and practice unconditional kindness to those around me.

Humanity is a story and there are only two ways it can end: relatively soon, as separate people that hate each other, or in thousands of years as a collection of different people that gets along.

That’s it. There’s no future in which we all live happily on a razor’s edge.

What else was in that little girl’s backpack?

I originally published this during the early days of the war in Ukraine and it felt too out of place given that I normally write about technology so I unlisted it. Though, after rereading it today, it left an imprint on me and I decided to publish it again in the event it affects anyone else.