Realizations of a Midnight Stroll
Thoughts from walking around my neighborhood at 1 am, while my neighbors probably thought I was on crack.
The Earth is round.
Now, I don’t know if you have ever been to Yosemite, but if you have, you will know just how absolutely beautiful the night sky is—free of light pollution, and all else. Sitting upon a bridge deep in the mountains in the pitch black nature of existence is an unsurpassable memory that everyone should experience, however whenever I take my first glance in the sky on my annual trip to Yosemite Valley, I always notice that one, crazy fact about the universe.
The Earth is fucking round.
Reality check. To me, this small realization is the absolute definition of ‘seeing is believing.’ There are things that you know, and there are things that you accept as the truth, although you never fully grasp the vastness of this understanding until it’s set right in front of you. For me, the snowglobe-like insanity comes in the form of the rural stars and cosmos that I fortunately get to experience every year, on Clark Bridge of Yosemite Valley.
Being American, we often get lost in our fast-paced, ever changing lifestyles. I live in Silicon Valley, where ‘fast-paced’ translates to ‘124-bit processors’, and ‘speed’ becomes—literally—a product demanded by the tech-hungry world market (tech BS). It is easy to become immersed in this culture, and is absolutely inevitable—which isn’t a bad thing, it’s natural.
It’s when I take my occasional midnight stroll when the Earth is suddenly still, and the streets are hardly audible, as I become consumed with the world around me. It’s when the stars are faintly shining through the urban sky when I realize emptiness of the universe, and how our problems are figments of utter imagination, and we are mere specs of cosmic nothingness upon an organic rock hurling through space at hundreds of miles a second.
More importantly, I love to solely appreciate the beauty of the planet on which we live. I will never pass up an opportunity to remind myself that “Holy shit, this place is rad.” Because it is.
So, the next time you find yourself awake at 2 am refreshing your dying twitter feed, take a humble walk down the street and just listen, ponder, question, smell, admire, and appreciate what’s around you. Humor me, and look up. You’ll probably think the same thing I do.
“Dude, the Earth is so fucking round!”