thoughtful – The Light of Day

“Sir?”

–

I read once that astronauts experience this thing called ‘the overview effect’. They get up there, into space, and they look back down at the Earth. And all in one frame they see their home. All of it. Everything they’ve ever known, all in one spot. And behind it is this endless, limitless, boundless, timeless, infinite expanse of empty black. It’s the closest thing to seeing the face of God itself.

And in that black, distance suddenly means everything and absolutely nothing at all. Miles no longer matter. And everything that maybe seemed so foreign or strange as a different country or culture on Earth is suddenly realized to have been so embarrassingly close by this whole time. There’s no such thing as an Other, or a Them, or a fight that’s at all worth fighting over when you see it from up above.

It’s why I like having the window seat on airplanes. When it’s taking off or coming in, and you’re just a few thousand feet above a major city, and you get to see it all while still being close to it. See all the cars on the highways, see all the streets winding like veins through business centers and neighborhoods, seeing all those houses, each with a family or two inside…

I read about another term too, called “sonder”, out of the Dictionary of Dark and Nameless Things. It’s the term for that existential feeling you can get when you realize that everyone you meet, everyone you come into contact with, even if it’s just a glancing one on the sidewalk or in a restaurant, they each have a story and an inner life that’s at least as rich and complex and complicated as your own, with thoughts, observations, dreams, lessons, experiences, wants, pains, et cetera.

However complicated my life may feel sometimes, or how drowning or urgent it may seem to me some nights, seeing all of those streets, those houses, those lives, those souls and lived experiences remind me how many of us there are. They remind me how incalculably many of our stories there have been throughout history, each and every one as meaningful or tragic or triumphant as the next. It reminds me that I am a drop within an ocean, one star inside a galaxy, no less phenomenal for my smallness nor my brevity on this planet, which itself is one among untold billions. And in that brevity and in that smallness comes the privilege of ever being.

And that, in itself, is pretty great.

–

“Sir?”
“Oh! Uh, yes? Sorry. Yes, what? Sorry.”
“Would you like anything from the drink cart?”
“Ah, a Sprite. Thank you.”

Oliver and Sarah walked along the beachside park. The wind was crisp with the sun trying its best to warm them from behind the heavy overcast. They walked on the sandy grass beside the paved path to make room for all the joggers, strollers, and headphone-wearing rollerbladers that used it too. They each nursed their own vanilla ice cream cone while they walked.

“Happy birthday, again,” Sarah said.

“Thanks,” Oliver chuckled weakly.

“How’s it feel to be thirty-three?”

Oliver chewed the inside of his cheek a moment in thought before answering.

“Tiring,” he said.

“Yeah,” she conceded.

They kept walking after that, occupying themselves with peoplewatching as they went. There was someone in large, flappy pants juggling bowling pins with a hat full of tips nearby. They saw an old couple laughing together on a park bench, and looked on at what seemed to be a fiery teenage break-up out on nearer the shore. There was also an overturned tricycle with a young father inspecting his son’s scraped knee next to it.

“I’m not as patient as I used to be,” Oliver sighed. “And that’s kind of a bummer. It used to be easy, but now it takes effort.”

Sarah nodded sympathetically. “I get that,” she said.

“I’m an optimist at heart, but the more I see things not work out it gets harder and hard to be that way. It’s like being out in the cold with an old jacket on. It’s familiar, cozy, and warm enough to keep out most of the chill, but it’s gotten thin with time and has some parts along the seams. You can feel the cold on the other side of the fabric and bits of the breeze sneak through here and there, but the jacket’s there too, keeping the heat in. It almost becomes about which you focus on is which you feel more, the warmth of the jacket or the chill reaching through it, and you flicker back and forth in this limbo between comfort and discomfort, making it sort of both and not really either, all at once.” He took a big breath, then let out a somehow bigger sigh.

“But I like my jacket,” he said.

Sarah glanced between Oliver and her own shoes. “It’s a pretty good jacket,” she agree quietly.

END