“The world is indeed full of danger, and there are many dark places in it; but yet there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it is perhaps greater.” ~JRR Tolkien
It was my son’s fifteenth birthday. His basketball game was canceled, so my wife, my son, and I got back in the car and headed home, somewhat disappointed.
We were always walking back to the house after playing. My wife was mid-sentence when something caught my eye before she finished it. There was an orange light in the sky.
I said almost nothing. It looked like it might be a plane, and I didn’t want to interrupt. But there was something different about it.
It didn’t blink. It was not moving the way a plane moves. And then it began to leave a streak, a long, fiery trail that burned across the dark sky.
I said, “Hey, what’s that?” And all three of us looked through the windshield at the same moment. It moves across the sky for a few seconds and then shrinks and disappears.
We pulled out our phones and we already found suspicious stuff. A meteor, perhaps, perhaps a fireball. We had assumed as much.
But knowing the word didn’t change what we felt when we saw it across the sky. As each of us calmed down at the same moment, some of us recognized it before our minds.
Science can tell what a thing is. It can’t tell you why it finds you when it does. We drove the rest of the way mostly in silence, that streak of light still playing in our minds.
We came back home and lit the candles and cut the cake. After our son put out the fire and made a wish, I wondered what my wife was hoping for as she took old photos. One minute we were eating, and the next we were passing the phone around the table, looking at pictures we hadn’t seen in years.
There was my son at four years old, round-cheeked, smiling at something off camera. There we were on the beach, all of us looking up at the sun. We laughed at our haircuts and bathing suits that we thought looked great at the time.
But there was something else beneath the smile, something that left us breathless and somewhat undone. Tried to brush off that feeling by saying things like “look how young you were” and “I can’t believe it was that long ago”. At one point we sat there for a while without saying anything, each of us looking at the same picture, feeling the same thing.
How did we get here so fast? Where did all this time go? You look around at the people you love, and the only thing you really want, all the wishes and things under the candle, is okay everyone is okay.
But none of us know what the future holds, and sitting there with cake on our plates and a meteor still fresh in our memories, I felt the pain of that fact more than usual.
I have been sitting with questions since that night. Did that mean the orange flash? Was the universe offering us something, or was it just a random event?
I don’t know and have made a kind of peace without knowing. What I do know is that beauty is everywhere if we just pay attention.
Seeing a meteor with your family is something that makes you stop and wonder what else could be out there. These moments don’t announce themselves and won’t ask for permission. They just appear, out of nowhere, in the middle of a drive home.
But on that same drive you may hear of people dying in places far away or not so far away. You see an old man as you sit alone at a table by a lighted window and wonder who he has lost. You can hold on to someone you love and know, somewhere inside, that you won’t always be able to.
The same magical world that gives you a burning light in the sky also carries inexplicable suffering, sometimes within the same hour, sometimes within the same mile. This part is the hardest for me but the most necessary to hold on to. Life is wonderful and terrifying at the same time.
Most of us are never taught how to carry it. We are taught to fix things, to find the silver lining, to move on. But some things just ask to be acknowledged.
The meteor was there, whole and bright and shining through the darkness, whether we realized it or not. There was also a breakdown in the family. Both were true under the same sky on the same night.
I don’t think we want to resolve that tension so much as learn to live within it. Let beauty be beautiful without the need to cancel out pain. Allow the sadness to be present rather than drowning out the light.
This is not a solution. It is something more demanding than a solution. It’s a practice, and some days it’s harder than others.
But I think the only way to fully live your own life, is to drive home after an evening that didn’t go as you hoped, look and see what’s out there.
My son turned another year older the night we saw that meteor cross the sky. We didn’t plan it, and we weren’t looking for it. We were just returning home from a canceled basketball game, and something wonderful happened.
I don’t know if it means anything. But I know it was there, and I know we saw it together. And I know that the same world that can break your heart can also set the sky on fire.
about Daniel H. Shapiro
Dr. Daniel H. Shapiro is a keynote speaker, author and consultant. He is passionate about human connection and the stories we carry with us. For more information about his book, 5 Practices of the Caring CounselorOr check out her mentoring and speaking services yourinherentgoodness.com.
