It's Behind You

One morning last week my social media feed was full of beautiful photographs of the Northern Lights which had apparently been visible over large areas of the UK the night before. One was taken on a hill five minutes from my house. As I am a passionate sky lover, who has many times happily set an alarm for the small hours in order to see something astronomical, I was absolutely gutted to have missed what looked to have been a really amazing display.

I’ve thought a lot about this over the week while I’ve had to talk myself down repeatedly from wild frustration and disappointment. It’s not a new feeling. I’ve lost track of the number of times the clouds of northern England have blocked the full moon, planetary alignment or lunar eclipse from my hungry eyes. It never gets any easier.

But suddenly, I settled into a new way of thinking about this. And it made me smile. Because a tiny bit of me actually quite likes the thought of whole towns full of quiet, sleeping houses, their inhabitants blissfully unaware of the beauty raging outside. Nature doesn’t care about our little lives. Nature just does her thing regardless, quietly, while we’re distracted or looking the other way. And while it’s gutting to miss the soft snow fall that drops in the stillness of night. Or the shooting star that streaks the sky behind us while we’re looking at something else, it is kind of cool to know that there is so much going on out there that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with us. Each night while we sleep, storms rage somewhere. Owls swoop with stealth and silence and pluck mice mid-scurry. A blue whale births a calf in the dark depths. A supernova blasts through the fabric of the cosmos. Human life begins and ends.

I will always be sad to miss the stars aligning, but it’s humbling and maybe even a teeny bit exciting to be reminded of how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things, mere atoms in the magical mechanism of the wonderful, unfathomable, mind-blowing universe.