Most days, I go about my everyday life, never really stopping to fully look up at the sky – I suppose we all do, mostly because we know it’s always going to be there.
We know that if we look up, we will be reassured that there will be that blue canvas sheltering us, sometimes embedded by shrieks of yellow; sometimes with grey undertones; sometimes it’s an explosion of colour; sometimes only black is visible, hints of light fighting to make their way out. But it’s always there, and it’s almost always a messy illustration.
About three years ago, my mind loved playing this lose-lose game, in which it would summon thoughts of only the worst things that could possibly happen, even in the best of times. I would look at anything and everything, seeing only its meaninglessness in the larger span of this universe. I’d think : Life? Meaningless – we’re all going to die sooner or later. Light? Meaningless- why see hope in anything if, hey, you’re going to die anyway!
The thing is, when my mind starts seeing life as a ditch of hopelessness, there’s no climbing out of it easily. I remain stuck in that ditch for hours upon hours, drowning myself in thoughts of the horrors of my everyday reality, most of which, if truly contemplated, are non-existent, and real only in my head. But when I am stuck in those tides, there is no time for proper contemplation. Room is only available for the idea of misery and despair, because who in their right mind would find this thing called life anything other than misery?
You see the light for the first time when you are born, and it results in you erupting in your first tears. Even as you grow, you can’t look at the sun in fear of being rendered blind. Yet, light is often associated with goodness and positivity. It’s painted as an incredible phenomena when, in reality, it can steal all sense of vision. Maybe the often overused metaphor of darkness has been incorrect all along, because, although we are blind in the dark, we are equally blinded by the light.
That’s something that has haunted me for the longest time-that metaphor of the sun coming out after the storm, light coming out after the war. The idea that humanity thinks of the dark moments as our worst sides. As a friend once told me, the reason we so often choose to show that dark side first is in the hopes that people will see that we can only get better. We show our insecurities and fears and everything else that we see as terrifying before showing anything good in the hopes that people will maybe, somehow, learn to love us – learn to love those parts of us that we consider utterly unlovable. We think if we show them the darkness first, the light can only be better.
Well, in reality, the bright moments are equally as terrifying, equally as blinding.
As Virginia Woolf once said, “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing a future can be.” Maybe it’s better to be blinded in temporary darkness, than being too immersed in brightness, which blinds you permanently. Maybe this lose-lose game isn’t so bad to play, because once you get out of the ditch, you appreciate everything so greatly that there is no getting back in for quite a long time. Sometimes a friend might even step in. Someone who had been there before, helping to show you how to climb out. Hope is the thing with feathers, and when you manage to fly out of that state of hopelessness, you almost never turn back. Once you see the view from above rather than from within that hole, life looks beautiful. Not all bright, not all dark, just beautiful.
So, on the tempestuous days when my mind restarts its old games, the days when I wake up consumed by fear, I start wandering “lonely as a cloud” as Emerson would say. And I end up in places I shall never see, thinking about how even though I shall never see these places, I am connected to them, because like Emily Dickinson once said “the brain is wider than the sky.” Everything we see is made possible by light. But, in that sky of my mind, I am withheld by no boundaries of light – no night and day, no boundaries of the fickle idea of time nor place. I am free to see the sky as I want to see it, to see the future as dark or as bright as I want to see it.
And it has a way of connecting us. Every time I look up, I am awestruck at the realization that every other being on the planet is also witnessing this.Whether it is a storm or a sunny day or the darkest of nights, we are all experiencing it together.
Looking up at the sky, you know that someone, somewhere, is looking up at it too. Someone feeling as hopeless and as meaningless as you is scanning that blue canvas for any hidden message of hope. And I think the hope comes in the form of knowing that you aren’t alone. The sky serves as a reminder that I am here, and you are here, and we are all here under this same sky all having the same disheveled emotions. And we’re all looking up for the relief of knowing that we are here together. We’re here because we’re here. That’s what makes the sky special. That’s what makes the light special. It shows us that we are all more alike than we will ever be different.
The sky undeniably has an unmatched ability to provide us with hope and meaning and a sense of togetherness in lost times. So, for that, I give the sky 4.5 stars.
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