When In Doubt, Look Up
I’ve always had a weird fascination with stars.
When I was eight-years-old, I distinctly remember waking up in the middle of the night and having my dad drive us to Crab Meadow Beach so we could watch a meteor shower. The sky exploded in front of my eyes, and an overwhelming feeling of comfort spread throughout my innocent body.
Soon after, I found myself frequently setting my alarm for 2am so I could climb out on the roof and search for shooting stars.
And today, I do my best to look up to find any in this washed out city — appreciating even a few blinking dots.
But what are stars, really?
The scientific answer is they’re huge exploding balls of gas that are roughly 25,300,000,000,000 miles away. They’re (literally) hot commodities with a surface temperature of 100,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Regardless, it’s an interesting concept: Most dont really care to know about the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen, or its radiative and convective processes, or even that they’re billions of years old.
Instead, there’s this universal (pun!) feeling of peace, wonder, and romance as we look up at these incredibly massive spheres of plasma and recreate them into tiny, twinkling dots of hope.
Here, a man gazes out at the stars along a beach in Southern Malawi. I was struck by this photo, for he could literally be anywhere. This immediately reminded me of when I stumbled upon my own African shoreline and gazed out into an abyss of starry dots. I was wondering where the heck I was, but looked up at a frequent sky and felt an enormous tension between the ordinary and the remarkable, the foreign and the familiar.
I had arrived in Ghana a few days prior, and when I wandered to a beach, I saw three little dots in a row: the tail of the Little Dipper. I didn’t know what I was actually seeing at the time, but that overwhelming moment of realizing where I so significantly and insignificantly was was marked by these three stars.
The three little dots followed me. I made a note to look after them as I traveled to other shorelines, villages and jungles. And when I returned to New York — icy and bitter, fast — I continued to gaze out at what were now my little dots, pretending I was back in the warm palms of Western Africa, recreating memories and moments that were thousands of miles and minutes away by simply looking up.
And I don’t know, it’s simply a cool concept to me. That we can literally be anywhere in the world and see the same three blinking stars, reproducing them into whatever memory, emotion, or concept we’d like. Stars can connect so many people on Earth, making the world seem a bit smaller as we gaze at these enormous astrological objects that are incredibly out of reach but so conveniently wrapped in our mind’s eye.
