Pondering the Stars of Our Lives

My parents just drove all the way up to my college to surprise me with a quick visit. Since they left, I have been considering the events like these that seem to light up life for a time. So much of life is stressful, worrisome, and dark. Yet then there are times like these that seem to shine in the midst of it all. It occurred to me that, in this way, life is akin to the nighttime sky. Across the expanse, it is widely just a great expanse of darkness. Yet on certain nights, the stars light up the sky and sparkle brightly from out of their dark surrounding. Just like the sky, our lives can seem like the great expanse of darkness, but there are always stars - small events that shine and make the whole beautiful in spite of the darkness. In fact, without the darkness, we would not be able to see the stars, nor appreciate their brilliant beauty. It is only in the contrast of dark and light that we are able to appreciate either of them fully.

Additionally, when we see a night sky lit up by a thousand stars, we cannot focus on the darkness; our eyes are instantly drawn to the bright, dancing beauty. This is akin to our lives as we reflect and look back over past years. We see the mistakes, we have regrets, we definitely see all the darkness, but that is not what stands out. We also recall the better times, the laughter, and the small happinesses that are the bright moments of our lives. They may be small, they may be infrequent, but they are the moments that stand out. Also, just as the stars appear tiny from our view, though they are enormous in reality, often, as the years pass by, our memory of the best moments will fade, so that we can no longer recall each detail, but we will still remember the feeling - the brightness, just as we can still see the brightness of the stars even light years away.

Some nights, the stars are veiled and the sky appears to be only dark. We cannot see the bright, we cannot focus on the good - we are overwhelmed by the darkness. But it is in times like these that we must remember that the stars are still there, just as they always are, they are just temporarily veiled. Soon, they will shine out again, appearing even brighter in our minds for having been absent for a time.