Forgetting About Peppermint Tea in Favor of Infinity

After last week's slight different venture, I made sure that it would be a clear night when I devoted my time to lay outside on the lawn chair on the back porch with my puffy coat, fox hat, and a cup of peppermint tea. Kind of like the sunset, I'd seen the stars before, many, many, many times, mostly on the very short walk to my front door after being out late. I thought after watching the sunset earlier. That the night sky would kind of be a let down because it wasn't as colorful. I'm proud to say that I was wrong. Sometimes it's really good to be wrong. As I took my first sip of my barely-cool-enough-to-drink-tea, I vowed that I'd go back in when it was finished. When I tilted my head up to the sky and stared at the stars, truly stared at them, for the first time in a while, I let out a long breath before smiling. They were beautiful, even though I'd never gotten the hand of seeing the constellations. (My mom somehow thinks all of them form either the Little or Big Dipper, so I was doomed from the start.) I stared up at the sky, letting my eyes drift around the sky. Some stars were larger than others, brighter than others. Maybe they were closer to me. Maybe then were inconceivably larger. Who knows? It wasn't important as I stared at them. I got lost staring at them for a while, getting kind of lost in their beauty and vastness. I think what I was doing was too intense and in-depth to call "gazing".  I completely forgot about my tea too, just in case you were wondering.

Reading back over my observations, I started thinking about constellations a lot, the idea of assembling pictures from stars and this was what I came up with in response to that idea: I don't think seeing the constellations would've made the stars more beautiful to me though. Making pictures out of something that was already stunning on its own kind of seems redundant, like you're over complicating it and aren't just appreciating it for what it is. Also, my mind drifted back to a Modern Western Thought discussion in which Mr. Nebbia said (I wish I could remember what work we were discussing, but for the life of me, I can't) that humans can't truly grasp the idea of infinity. Looking out at the stars that night, I understood that. I simply could not fathom and still cannot even come close to understanding how many stars were in the little portion of sky I was seeing. There are infinite more little chunks of sky out there similar, but not identical, to the portion of the sky I was viewing. I can't even begin to get my head around how many stars there are out there. It makes my head hurt.

Just because you don't fully understand something doesn't make it any less beautiful, in fact, it might make it even more beautiful. Just because you don't fully understand something doesn't mean you need to try and make pictures out of it or study it with a telescope to understand it. Sometimes, things are beautiful just as they are, in their infinitely complicated ways, like human beings and stars.