Seeing The Milky Way On A Night Sky With My Naked Eyes

Remembering A Time I Was Humbled And Awed

I felt humbled and awed the first time I saw the Milky Way. Not in a photograph or a painting, but with my own eyes.

I spent 20 minutes writing this. You need 1 minute to read this.

Imagination of watching the Milky Way from a campsite.

In 2017, my friends, wife, and I had a long day on the road. We reached our campsite at midnight at Joshua Tree National Park, ready to snuggle in. But someone had already taken our spot. We found an open spot and finally settled on the floor in the parking lot.

I expected to see a few stars and fall asleep. But we looked up when it got truly dark. There it was: the Milky Way. Billions of stars stretched across the sky.

I didn’t know the Milky Way was visible to the naked eye. 

I imagined the planets orbiting these stars silently. I thought about the nuclear reactions inside each star in the universe. I thought of the billions of galaxies in the universe with their stars, and getting to see just one galaxy right now.

That scale amazed me. It reminded me how small I am in the universe. It made me question why we center everything around ourselves - a egocentric, human-centric worldview.

I'm writing this as part of a SuperBetter exercise. The task was to either watch something awe-inspiring or write about a moment that made me feel that way. I chose to write. Writing helps me connect more deeply to a feeling than watching.