Moonless Sky

I’ve been sitting here in my chair for few hours in the night wondering what I want to do next. I was not particularly busy that day, splurging on documentaries about poverty, suicide and heartbreaks which will affect me for the next forty minutes but entirely forgetting them afterwards. Then I repeat on the routine again for the next day if I day still looks normal that why do I wonder on those depressing things even though I’m an upbeat person. Sometimes I go feeling down for no particular reason that trains of negative thoughts are zipping behind me. These things shouldn’t exist in my mind but why does this most complex thing in the universe sitting on our body do this to me, reminding me all the negative feelings, legitimate or imagined, anytime of the day? Why is our mind better at reminding us of painful pasts than to be giddy in an interesting future? While writing this, my mind is still at loss for the next words and phrases that will be typed to complete the two thousand – word essay. But is this the essay I wanted? Probably I was just connecting string of random verses and typing them immediately in a Microsoft Office word document and not missing a beat. I remember reading a mental exercise from my father’s book called “Seven Habits of Highly Successful People” when I was younger, which it says that for a challenge, he should write any essay that would come to his mind and never stop writing. If the challenged is stumbled to write, he just needs to keep moving his pencil until such that a new idea will pop up in his mind. What I’m doing now probably lies along with that but it didn’t matter because this might the proof that I exist, assuming that LinkedIn will be here for the years to come and people would start searching my name on the Internet. I no longer even care if this is a well – written post because this is a mixture of pure instincts, some laziness and some things that my heart wanted to hear out. If this was the type of content that I was able to write, the people might think of me as rather uninteresting because I don’t have much to share, save for the occasional situations where I was in, just like Steven Spielberg’s type of individuals that he like to portray in his movies he directed; an everyman caught in extraordinary situations.

Now what kind of extraordinary situations we are in? Is it the pandemic? Perhaps. Is it the mere fact that we can still work despite the very dim odds of finding a job in the middle of pandemic? Seems legit. Or was it the only thing that was more interesting was me because the environment where I exist is now less interesting an I just shown like a candle in the darkness? Can’t tell. But I just don’t want to focus on myself because other’s lives are more interesting than my own. I do remember reading the same book mentioning Lynn on page 134. I couldn’t remember what is the character Lynn was written in that book but I fondly remember her as my high – school classmate which I had a close affinity to her. Whenever I came across the page 134 and seeing her name printed in lime green font of that book, I instantly get excited and say her name in sweet voice while reading that page. This is weird because getting excited in the mere mention of her name anywhere in the book looks like I… hmmm damn. If only there was a word which describes the feeling of excitement whenever you see her name anywhere. I forgot what is the name of that psychological flaw for that, but at least I hope in the few moments we’ve been together, she’ll remember me forever. Moreover, her name is mentioned once in the book which can be seen on page 134 and the number 134 is special to me, at least is my teenage eyes, because when you rearrange the number 134 into 143, the number 143 is associated with terms like “I love you” or “I like you” and if there was ever that the possibility that Lynn fancied me as much as I fancied her, wow, I don’t know what to do with it. We could have probably become very close friends. We all have those kinds of fantasies in our minds even if we are now adults and now become part of the functioning population in the society. I do have some mixed to negative critical reactions to the word “society” but there is no point in dealing with it because whatever the constructs the society has created by our forefathers, there was always the possibility that it might be broken, depending on the type of people living at this present. Although I mentioned Lynn in the preceding page, it might be a sign that I’m a normal person capable of forming loving relationships to others, as long as I was given the right armament for struggles in the future. I’m at this point in life that all of my peers have experienced relationships and are often getting into one without any problems that I am marveled and at the same time terrified by them and the idea of relationships. If there was a playful game in a high school batch (or university buds) which is named the “The Last Man Standing” wherein the last man or woman who never entered into a romantic relationship since birth, I would clearly become the winner and reap all the prizes. I wonder what are the prizes are. Perhaps something I could touch and earn the nickname “The Wizard”?

Doesn’t matter though because I’m more excited in seeing my peers getting into relationships because I could imagine them having the most intimate moments with their significant others. I love imagining them being happy and contented with their cute eyes squinting from giddiness toward their partners in their new endeavor toward the fusion of a man and woman in the future that I was always waiting for my peers to invite me in their weddings a few years from now. They’re already at their late twenties, perhaps 26 or more, that the prospects of marriage is looming large as time goes on and I’m getting excited by them. Can you imagine seeing your peers being in touch with their future spouses, laying their heads against their boyfriend’s/girlfriend’s shoulders while watching the sun set in the seaside and talking about anything imaginable? That their bodies are so close to each other that I wonder what is the feeling to be beside to your significant other when you are so close to each other emotionally? I was happy seeing them giddy that I wonder if I could experience it myself. If I was the boyfriend or the girlfriend of the peers I see, I wonder what look like when they see me. If I entered the body of their boyfriends or girlfriends, I wonder what they would say to me while I silently possessed their boyfriends and girlfriends. Probably I would hear the sweetest words their significant others could muster from all their lives. Probably I could feel the most emotional act their significant others have ever done in their lives. Probably I could relive it only on my memory because I could only manipulate anything in my imaginations than real life. Possibilities might be endless but surprisingly few ideas are worth imagining.

But those what I have written above is just part of the fancy ideas. Romantic relationships are sure quite interesting and sometimes it just pops up in my head every now and then. I often look at the night sky when I have nothing to do and see how serene that is. All my worries simple are erased from existence whenever I looked at the night sky and wondering what could I do if I was there reaching for the night skies. Me and my peers are seeing the same night sky so probably that would be only thing which is common to us. After looking at the moonless sky and seeing the twinkling faint stars at the distance, we could say that life’s problems and inconveniences are inconsequential in comparison to the very vast expanse of space. I remember seeing the picture of the Earth which was taken by the Voyager 1 in February 1990 about billions of kilometers away before hurtling into interstellar space which was later called the “Pale Blue Dot”. I couldn’t describe the feeling when I first see it but the image was a powerful metaphor how inconsequential our problems and our existence are. As reflected by the late scientist Carl Sagan in his preface of his later published book Pale Blue Dot;

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

A moonless sky. A very great place to see and to hold. With its sheer brilliance amid the chaos of the coming tomorrow and the fear of facing the people that would ignore you, this is a stark reminder than no matter how heavy the problems you are facing now, that doesn’t compare to the vastness and power of the universe and the realization that we are only just visiting in this world, that we are just tourists in this fallen world and we have the moral obligation to make life easier for others in any way we can. We are always afraid of detachment from anything we love but we need to accept that they won’t always be there when we seek them. But despite the odds, we can only say we need to be stay strong because that might be only thing we could say when an extraordinary time comes.

Sometimes, looking at a moonless sky is a very soothing experience. Moonless nights are awesome too!