I happen to have a beautiful view outside my front kitchen window that includes trees, the sky, and grass during the day and stars and moon at night. I had just gotten my girls to bed last night when I came into the dark kitchen and was drawn to the window again. Fireflies were busy lighting up the front yard like little sparklers darting on and off, but when I looked up I only saw the moon. I had expected to see stars twinkling and constellations I could recognize, but instead I only saw that bright moon and blank sky. I was a bit disappointed and thought that it was cloudy, but then I realized it was obviously completely clear and had to chuckle at myself.
I couldn’t see any stars because my eyes hadn’t adjusted to the dark yet, but as I kept looking I began to see twinkles here and there, and soon the sky was filled with little sparkling lights. I stayed there enjoying the view of fireflies here on Earth and the stars above me, and I started thinking about how quick I was to decide there simply weren’t stars to be seen that night. We really do this often in our daily lives and we may not even realize it. We see the man who cuts us off in traffic, but we can’t see that he is distracted because he is on the way to the hospital to visit his sick wife, we hear our coworker talk too loudly on the telephone but don’t hear him confessing to his doctor that he just can’t hear the way he used to or to his wife that he gets so nervous at work that he ends up talking loudly to cover his fear of making a mistake.
The stars are always there whether it’s clear or there is a tornado blowing our house away, but we only see them when we stop, look up, and happen to do both on a clear night. We don’t think about them sparkling in the background unseen by our limited human vision any more than we think about why our child talked back to us, the mailman put our mail in the wrong box, or how hard the grocer worked to stack the peppers that we sorted through in our hurry to get home last week. I thought about the classic glass half full or empty and my own idea that it it is full whether we see the air in it or not, and really the list goes on and on if we consider how many times we base our decisions on what our eyes or ears pick up in a few seconds of scattered attention.
I know that in my younger years I have drawn incorrect conclusions about people based on how they dressed or how neatly their hair was brushed, and when my eyes adjusted with some experience and age I realized I had judged them before my eyes had learned to see past exteriors. I also caught my own reflection in more than a few mirrors I happened to pass by in stores and got a really thorough lesson in judging people on the basis of the apparent time he or she took to prepare for a shopping trip since I didn’t recognize myself for a moment. That lady with the sweats on and the hair pulled into a quick pony tail must not care much about her appearance or anything else at all to come out in public looking that way, right? Or perhaps she is very busy and needed groceries on the way home from the Y? Who would have known by my appearance, but I am sure people around me might have been able to “just tell”.
As the stars began to appear last night in the sky outside my window I also thought about that moon that wasn’t completely visible, and although I know the moon is basically round I would have had to tell you it was a half circle hanging in the sky somehow if you had asked me to tell you its shape based only on my view from my window. The older I get and the more things I see that I don’t see, the more I learn how little we are really able to see from our own singular vantage points. No wonder there are so many wars and smaller battles on the home front considering how many pairs of eyes are in various stages of adjustment on our planet. We can’t always see the stars until our eyes adjust, and many times we don’t even realize we aren’t seeing anywhere near the truth or the whole picture. It really makes one look a little closer if we think about all the beautiful stars we don’t see until we give ourselves a little time to see from a different perspective. As we say in astronomy when we wish someone a beautiful dark, clear sky full of stars unobscured by the light from a bright moon, “Happy seeing”!
