For You, Billions of Years Ago

If it’s always sunny, it’s never sunny.

The darkest days make the brighter ones matter. That’s true of the seasons we live through. It’s bittersweet.

Even the sunniest places see destruction and chaos. Everything exists in balance, whether it makes sense or not, whether it’s fair or not.

And when things fall apart, don’t they often come back together stronger? Sometimes more beautiful? There’s no law that guarantees this, but we see it all the time. In cities, in careers, in relationships.

They say the happiest people are often the saddest. Some of the loudest voices hide the deepest insecurities. At some point, something has to give.

That’s why summer feels different here. The difference is the contrast. We trudge through months of darkness and bitter cold. So when summer comes, it feels more potent. Every extra hour of daylight. Every degree of warmth. Leaves on the trees. Lakes flowing again. That’s when we understand what it means to feel alive.

Maybe that’s what all of this points to.

Balance.

Life and death. Light and dark. The contrast isn’t easy to write about. It means revisiting memories and sitting with them long enough to put them into words. It’s like peeling back layers to show what’s underneath.

I tell myself there’s light at the end of the tunnel and that all of this has meaning.

I try to remember that everyone is going through something. Yet I catch myself judging how people move without considering the season they’re in. I think about what could have been. The things that might have thrived if different paths had been taken.

The threads that keep us connected aren’t all the same. Some are strong, the ones I look back on and smile. Others fray, snap, or grow weak, and sometimes we have no control over it.

How far would you travel just to see someone smile? Pay attention to those people.

Maybe that’s what connection really is. A combination of distance, will, and time.

Take the telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful space telescope ever built. It captures light from billions of years ago to form images of the universe. When you look at one of those images, you’re essentially looking billions of years into the past.

And still, these images are some of the most vivid and striking we’ve ever seen. Nebulas, galaxies, entire systems scattered across vast darkness, where even a speck could be a galaxy like our own. Entire worlds inside pixels we barely notice.

To create something that beautiful, it had to gather light from the past.

Light from the past traveling through space and time to create something we can see, learn from, and appreciate. That’s life.

And that light has nowhere to go but forward. We take all the light as it comes.

Damn, I’m glad we’re here.

Hi mom.