The Point Is: I Wanted to Find It

I don't stargaze a lot. I probably should.

Being a writer, I should probably look up at the heavens and conclude that whatever I'm saying and whatever I'm saying it about really aren't that big a deal when you get right down to it. We are, after all, such a small speck of the universe that, all told, we really aren't much to discuss, all eight billion of us.

But then, of course, that begs a question: Why are we here, here on a planet that, compared with the sun that warms us from ninety-three million miles away, is comparable to a dot on an i with a basketball? And are we the only ones?

Carl Sagan, in his classic work Cosmos, did a mathematical estimation of the odds that we were alone. He came up empty. There have to be other beings out there, he wrote. Some of them have to be smarter than us.

Just look at the present situation. End of discussion. Don't get me started.

There is an incredible amount of activity going on in just our galaxy, which is one of hundreds of thousands of galaxies. And a galaxy has hundreds of thousands of stars. It blows the mind, which is probably why not too many people devote their lives to watching all that, or as much as they can with the obviously inadequate tools we now have.

Hey, I got enough with my own problems. What the hell do I want to take all that on for?

Well, I don't, actually. But one can look at the heavens the way others do and did, with a sense of wonder and proportionality. You can look for signs, like others did.

So that's why yesterday I thought I could see the proximation, relatively speaking, of the planets of Jupiter and Saturn, which will come closest today, apparently, just after sundown. Very likely, though, the sky will be cloudy, as it usually is in December in Wisconsin, obscuring it.

I thought there would be clear sky yesterday. I went southwest of Milwaukee to a Park-and-Ride, hoping the sky would reveal it, not closest but close enough. It didn't. I turned around and headed home.

What good did I do myself? I went on a galactic wild goose chase. I kind of knew it before I left. But I had to go. I'm 

Something inside of me told me to. Something inside of me seeks comfort, reassurance, and wonder. Jupiter and Saturn come relatively close every twenty years, and as close as this every eighty. This is my last shot.

The last time they came this close, apparently, was in 1226. That's a long time ago. Or, not, if you consider the age of the universe, some 13 billion years, apparently. That's just a pinprick, an eye blink. Eight hundred years.

Think of what's happened in eight hundred years. The end of the Dark Ages. The Renaissance. The entirety of Western civilization. The exploration that brought Europeans to the Americas. The horrors of slavery that provided the economic sustenance, and other genocides. Wars upon wars and their horrible destruction. Plagues every so often and their devastation, the middle of one we're presently in (which ho-hums it, of course, but there is nothing new under this sun, either). Inventions. Revolutions of some type or another. The growth of population probably eight times what it was. The last sixty years, more people have been born than lived and died before it.

All on this little orb of a planet. No, it isn't big, not big at all. But it's hosted an incredible amount of humanity. We know of a part of it, but not nearly the stories of every one of us. The amount of recording and writing about the human race is a shaving of the experience of each one of us.

I have no idea why, and neither do you. But it all happened and is happening. It makes sense to pull off the road, literally, and watch something larger than us, that functions in spite of us, that has little if anything to do with us.

So I did. Or, I tried. The point is that I wanted to find it. I wanted to reassociate myself, at the end of the worst year that I've existed for more than one reason, knowing that something is going to happen that's completely out of my control or our control, that nobody can help, but that re-establishes the fact of things. One of which is, I'm not really very important amidst all this.

Which, instead of being intimidating and crushing, spurs me on to the future, as little as there now is of it in a normal lifespan. I don't have that much time left; without medical advancement, in fact, it would now be gone. It's time to go do what I want without listening to people saying or implying that I'm crazy. 

Of course I'm crazy. Crazy that I haven't done more to this point.

I won't leave heirs behind; too late for that. But I can leave behind memories. It's what's left.

So if it's not going to matter all that much, I might as well do it. Maybe I won't amaze anyone anymore. Maybe I'll just amaze myself. Might as well. I will go away soon enough, and so will this planet.

That isn't as a ridiculous a notion as could have been wondered a generation ago. The planet is under more stress than ever before. It will carve out a new reality soon enough. 

I will keep recycling plastic and paper and buy an electric car if or when they become cheap enough. The rest has to be left up to collective wisdom, which, see above, has been a bit wanting nowadays.

The year has been horrible. But what makes humankind maddeningly frustrating and disappointing is and has been balanced by what makes it amazing: Vaccines are coming, for now. Democracy has been saved, for now. There are some people, some leaders actually, who do care about the lot of us.

It's incredible that so many people fail to see the greater good. Whether or not it will prevail is still an open question. But many also do see it. We still have a chance if we remember how much we matter to the rest of the world we inhabit and act that way. We've tried four years of the opposite. Didn't work very well.

Maybe that's why I went looking to the heavens: To wish upon a star. Others have done so. Songs have been written about it.

As we turn the page, our challenges remain great and in some sense now greater; messes need to be cleaned up. But now we know what can happen with the wrong people in charge. Maybe they ironically did us a favor. Maybe that's all we can give them credit for. Maybe that will be enough.

Maybe we can wish that, too, upon a star.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.