A beautiful night

It was 12:30 AM and I was standing outside in Scottsdale, Arizona, when all of a sudden I happened to gaze upwards into this midnight blue sky flecked by hundreds of little lights, barely visible until you peered closely behind the hazy veil of transparent wispy clouds. It was a beautiful starry night, as beautiful as any I have seen, and I stood there spellbound in wonder. The mesmerizing sight took me back to the nights when I as a child, would sit out in verandah with my family during our summer vacations in Southern India, gazing together in awe at the clear night sky studded with a seeming multitude of diamonds. At that time I remember, albeit vaguely, it seemed as if each star seemed to pop out of the sky, waiting, begging even, to tell its story and regale us with its anecdotes, if only you were ready to spend a few extra moments making eye contact.

Now as I stood there looking at the sky, wiser, thinking about the big bang theory, wondering about the size of that gigantic ball of gas, whose faint flickering light was just a dying reminder of a moment from millions of light years past, I felt a hint of nostalgia for the child that had grown (though how much is still in question), and how much the mystique of the vast night sky had morphed for me over the years. Gone was the child that could spend hours staring wide-eyed at that vast openness and instead was a young man whose imagination was now bound and shackled by cynicism and knowledge.

The mystery will always be there, at least perhaps in my lifetime, but the childlike wonder and amazement had matured into respect and an immense appreciation for the ability to feel that awe and majesty of nature’s beauty. I also felt a tinge of sadness for the loss of some of that innocence, that somehow wanted to believe that the stars had a more personal story to tell. That maybe it's one of my ancestors twinkling benignly as she watches sagely over me, or maybe those two shapes over there are really the hunter and his prey, forever dancing across the night as one flees while the other pursues relentlessly. But the child had grown, and the adult knew better, sadly.

Life shapes us, molds us. each new experience somehow peeling away another crumbling wallpaper and pasting in its stead a new one, sometimes brighter more colorful, sometimes darker more sombre. Sometimes we choose the wallpaper and other times life chooses for us. But gazing at that night sky and letting that breathtaking beauty wash over me, for a few fleeting moments I became a child once more, free with my imagination, blissfully lost in the wonder of that night sky.