Looking for Stars
Some people look up into the darkness and feel comforted by the stars. The bright spots of light peppering the vast unknown represent hope.
Where there is light, we can see.
What we see, we can know.
What we know, we can understand.
Through understanding, we find comfort.
Others, like yours truly, look for dark spots on sunny days. Identifying the dark makes my day seem brighter. I want to see the counterbalance of the sunbeam that’s dancing through the fluffy white clouds. Finding pain, knowing what and where it is, increases my capacity for appreciating all of the happy and beautiful things around me.
The magnetic pull I feel towards the darkness does not, I believe, make me a pessimist. I consider myself relentlessly optimistic. I’d even say that I’m an evangelist for the innate human capacity for feeling awesome in spite of any hardship. I’m not saying that it’s easy, I just believe with every cell in my body that it is possible.
My reasoning? After repeatedly seeking out dark spots, walking into their depths to float in the melancholic water where I am comforted by the familiar feeling of not knowing if my eyes are open or closed and the uncanny weight of empty air pressing down on my chest, I still feel happy.
That does not make me special.
I am just a person.
I am a person who knows that I can swim on towards a new dark pool, or move through it to find the shores of the next sunny day.
Beauty and ugliness. Sorrow and hope. Pain and pleasure. Everything is fleeting and happening simultaneously. I believe we can pick what we see. We can choose what we feel. We can find comfort in the unknown. We can channel our focus into going placidly towards complacency and darkness, or towards action.
This has been an unimaginable year, and I believe that we haven’t seen the worst of it. I don’t know anyone who isn’t struggling and being tested. It takes very little effort right now to find the dark spots.
But everywhere I look I can find examples of love, of hope, of making changes that are long overdue. The stars I see most brightly are the ones that live inside of each of us.
