1 Hidden Treasure We Often Fail to See

I woke up in the middle of the night. Buried under the covers, I felt a crisp, cold air brush my face. Winter was approaching.

The silence of the night was still as ice, the only audible sound the ticking of my watch on my nightstand. I reached over and checked the time. 4:00 AM. Good. I still had an hour before the day began and life resumed its relentless pace.

I buried myself again and turned about trying to find a more comfortable position when something outside caught my eye. From my second-floor window, the darkness of night shrouded the Roman countryside in a quiet sleep. Nothing moved, and not a sound could be heard. Everything was still. But what stole my sight wasn’t on this earth.

It was the sky.

I looked up, and hundreds of stars littered the night sky. Crystal clear and shining through the darkness, they stood like sentinels watching over us in the night. It brought my mind back five years ago when I lived in New Hampshire, where the clean air enabled the stars to shine with an unparalleled brilliance. Right outside my window, I saw Orion gleaming down on me. There’s no explaining what I felt. It filled me with awe. I gazed at utter beauty.

When we see the stars on a clear night, we behold a great wonder.

The sight leaves us speechless. Ever since ancient times, people wondered what they were. Some thought they were gods, others, a fixed layer of lights in the sky, and still others, the limits of the universe.

Modern science has given us a clearer idea of what they are, but nonetheless, they never cease to amaze us and cause us to marvel at their beauty. Even more so when we think about how long it took for the lights we see to reach us, that when we look up, we see a picture of the stars as they were many years ago.

In just one simple glance at a night sky, we see the beauty of the stars spanning hundreds and hundreds of centuries.

And if we go further, we can find so much more. Behind each light is a huge gas giant, most probably bigger and stronger than our sun. Imagine the energy and the light that each one emits. It would be quite a sight from up close. There’s so much behind every little dot in the sky.

That nighttime experience made me think. Isn’t life the same way? If we take a look around us, don’t we see so much to marvel at? So many beautiful things that impress us and cause us to smile? Things that make our lives more efficient, pleasurable, or simply just more livable? A beauty resulting from thousands of years of work and technology? The bed we lie on, the car we drive, the phone we have, the roads we drive on, the food we eat, the books we read, etc.

There are so many things that we come into contact with every single day. And it’s true, just looking at them is something wonderful.

But just like the stars, if we go further and look deeper, we can find a greater marvel than what meets the eye:

The individuals behind it all.

I have the gift of living in one of the most famous cities in the world.

Although most of my time is spent buried in my studies, I do manage to get some time out and about. If you’ve been to Rome, it’s a city flooded with tourists, historical sites, and a lot of good food. Every day in the city is a new and exciting experience.

But there’s something that one often misses in the mass of excitement.

The other day, I was commuting on the train into the city and was drawn toward the people around me.

It was early in the morning, and everyone was quiet, bundled up in their coats and jackets. Some were catching a few extra minutes of shut-eye, others were busy texting away on their phones, others were just looking out the window at the Roman scene flying by. These weren’t people from the tourist crowd. It was too early. Only 6:30 in the morning. No, this was another face of Rome, the ordinary people on their way to work. These were the businessmen, the tour guides, the shop owners, the waiters and waitresses, the clerks, in a word, the people who ran the city. Individuals who work trying to scrape out a living. There were people from all types of backgrounds: Italians, Romanians, Africans, Middle-Easterners, Indians, and Asians. I know that many of them had to leave their home in search of work abroad. Often for the families they’ve left back home. For them, Rome was not a vacation spot, but their only hope.

And it struck me.

Behind all the sights and sounds, behind the cuisine, behind the Roman experience were these hidden people who get up and work every day, often underpaid, underappreciated, and overlooked in the vast sea of commotion, yet who are responsible for all the beautiful things in the city, who make Rome what it is.

Add to that all the people from the past who designed and built the piazzas and churches and monuments all over the city. Not the famous ones, but the ones we’ve never heard of, lost in the vacuum of history, but without whom the city would be unrecognizable. Like those who invented pasta and pizza.

Other cities and towns might not have the beautiful architecture or the rich history of Rome, but no matter where we are, many incredible things surround us and, more importantly, behind them all are real breathing people behind who so often are hidden and unrecognized.

On any given day, we depend on so many things for our work, our leisure, and our sustenance, but how often do we go beyond the things and see gift of the person who worked to make these things realities? They were people like you and me who dedicated time and effort, and countless hours to think, create, and develop these things, to bring forward advances in technology. People from all times and ages who worked together and gave the best of themselves. People who took risks, sacrificed so many other things, and gave their lives so that we would have what we do. These people are the true treasures of this world.

From the bed we lie on, to the room we live in, to the car we drive, to the clothes we wear, so many things have the fingerprint of a human being impressed in them. In them, we can get a deeper glimpse into the beauty of a human life, and a glimpse of what each one of us is capable of.

It’s a sad thing that in today’s culture of online orders and electronic transactions and do-it-yourself checkouts, it’s so easy to lose the sense of the other. It threatens to cut off the human touch, the human contact. We must fight against this, fight to keep our humanity.

That night, I lay in bed thinking of all the fact that I did nothing to deserve the beauty of the stars. But nevertheless they still shine, and I can appreciate their splendor. Same thing with the world in which we live. There are so many things that we have which we don’t deserve, yet we still have them thanks to so many others who worked to give them to us.

Let’s give them the credit that they deserve.

When we look around at the world around us, let’s see not just the things we have, but the real, breathing men and women who labored and toiled to give us the life that we live.

If each of us appreciated the person next to us, how different the world would be.

Let’s change the way we look at things and change the way we see the world.

Let’s get beyond the things, beyond the material, beyond the sea of convenience, and try to discover the people behind them.

Behind everything we have is a face, a name, and a history waiting to be discovered.

Will you be one of those willing to find it?

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