Scattered light

Drawing the lines between the dots

I love spending time starting at the sky and trying to catch different kinds of constellations.

Not because I’m really good at finding them, I’m really not.

I still have to hold up my glowing rectangle pointed at the sky, trying to figure if this star is part of something bigger or is it just… a star.

We may not see the whole picture of the sky as there is light pollution here, but the sky is full of tiny little points of light.

Someone usually always manages to point out Orion. Usually me in this group. Another one might say “See the Bear over there?”

And once you see the pattern, it’s really hard to unsee it. Because once the lines are there, the picture almost feels obvious now.

That’s the thing I latch onto, the stars never drew the lines for us, there was no connection between them.

Not until we connected them.

We know they’re not really connected either. Many of them are separated by absurd, crazy, not for us to comprehend distances. Some are millions of years older than others. And some are moving away from each other as if they got mad.

If you were able to leave Earth and look at these same constellations from somewhere else in the universe, good chunk of them would disappear, the bear would had gone into hibernation.

They’re only constellations from here where we stand with our two feet.
And perhaps that’s why they’re so special and I love that.

Thousands of years ago people looked up at the same exact sky and started connecting these sparkly little things into full stories.

“That’s the hunter and that’s the bear. And if you look to the right you will see the swan with the scorpion.”

Different cultures had their own stories, their own pictures of what the night sky looked like. The sky didn’t change, but the eyes who viewed it did.

And then we found meaningful use for those little stories.

People crossed oceans while looking at the bear. Some found their way home because of Orion. We passed these stories from one generation to the next, telling kids there is a bear in the sky and them looking back at us with confusion, “that doesn’t look like a bear.”

Maybe we as humans have always needed a way to connect things that are scattered into something that we understand and can carry with us.

We don’t do it with stars only either, we do it without our everyday lives.

You stop for coffee because you have twenty minutes to spare before the next errand, or the time when you decided to take the longer walking path because the weather was nice. Or when you met someone at a birthday party you almost didn’t go to. And heck, the time you missed one train and had to catch the next one.

None of these moments are “special,” normal every day living. None of them made you think that you need to pay attention to this because this is what I will miss one day when I’m old and beautiful.

They’re just little.. points of light that are scattered across very normal weeks.

Then time does what time does the best, passes.
Days, months, years, go by.

And one sunny afternoon you’re telling someone how you ended up where you are right now, and without even thinking twice about it, you have started to connect the stars. Drawing lines between two points.

You remember that cute coffee shop in the corner of the street because that’s where the idea first showed up, you remember the walk because you made a decision you had been avoiding for days. You remember missing that train because if you hadn’t, you never would had met the person who sleeps next to you at nights now.

It’s almost comical in a way.

The story was not there in the middle of it, while you were running trying to catch that train. If appeared way later, when the whole sky way ready to be connected.

Maybe that’s why life is sometimes so difficult to understand when you’re in the middle of these events.

We keep trying to recognize the whole constellation while we’re down here holding just one single star. Wondering why it’s not doing anything. We keep asking it questions that don’t even have answers yet.

Why did this happen?
Why right now?
Where is this even going?
What is the point in any of this?

There is nothing wrong with these questions, they’re not “bad questions.” We just tend to ask these questions way too early, before the whole star even exists yet.

Think back to those old photo albums we have tugged somewhere around the house.

One picture alone doesn’t really connected the dots. Someone standing next to a lake at, a singe image of a birthday cake with three candles, a blurry photo where everyone is laughing as the picture got taken.

They nice, no doubt.
But they’re only a star, incomplete.

Only after years go by and you collect hundreds of photographs, the connections start to happen.

“That was the summer before we moved, oh I miss that house!”
”Hey that was the trip where the car broke down and we had to walk 3 miles to a near by town.”
”Ah, that was the last Christmas before the kids became taller than the adults were.”

Nothing about the pictures changed, they’re still the same. But the way you see them, your perspective, it’s completely new now.

You finally see the constellation.

Makes you think how many moments are just sitting in our laps right now, waiting for the right time so that the line can be drawn between them.

Like a receipt that is hiding inside a jacket pocket, or a phone call you almost didn’t answer to, or the bookstore you happened to wander into because it started raining.

These random moments don’t feel connected, I mean why would they.

They’re happening one at a time, like stars usually do, they don’t just show up together. Again, some are million years older than others.

Maybe this thought can give you some peace today, because not everything needs to have to explain itself at this moment. You don’t need a reason to why this is all happening. Maybe this moment is just another tiny star in the constellation.

I also love that constellations only work because of the distance.

If you stand too close to a single star, you don’t get to see the whole picture. You need to see the whole sky to appreciate and connect it.

Life is very similar.

When you’re inside a difficult week that keeps asking more from you, you feel it’s impossible to get anything done.

Everything feels equally as important and falling down.
Everything is just right up in your face.

But then months go by and you look back to that time.

Sure, some of those stars glow brighter than others, that’s normal.
Some are the faintest little fellas you can barely even see.

Distance is what simplifies things for us without erasing them completely, all the tiny little details are still there, they just settle into a shape you weren’t able to see before.

Maybe that’s why you start telling stories differently when you’re older, not because you’re memory is failing at you, but because you know you don’t need to remember every single day, every single star.

You need to remember the constellations, the move, the friendship, the season where you decided to change it all. The tiny little decision that somehow became the beginning of something much much larger.

They have had enough time to step back from the sky and see the whole constellation.
While younger generations are still worried about the single star most of the time.

Sometimes I think about what kind of constellations are we leaving behind, not just in the sky, but in each other.

Someone remembers a phrase years after you’ve already forgotten you ever said it.
Or a walk that mattered more than the person realized, as it calmed down their nervous system and gave them all the answers they needed.

We don’t usually get to know when we’re becoming someone else’s star. We just think we’re having another very normal day, moving through the world.

When you look back at your life, it does have a sense of connection.
But living it, being in the thick of it, it does not.
Living feels more like scattered memories here and there.

A cup of coffee that turned cold, a missed highway turn while going to a new restaurant, a day that looks exactly like all the other days you’ve had, or a patch of sunshine that makes you take the long way home because the weather is nice.

All of these just one single star in the constellation of life.

Until another one appears, and another.

There is no rush to make it a constellation either. The sky took billions of years and I have a feeling that even that story is not completely done yet.

It just keeps filling in the blank spots, slowly.

Until years later someone lies back in the grass, looks up and starts drawing lines between the stars.

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