december 1st. i never thought it was anything spectacular, astronomically speaking. the sky was just smiling, that’s all. and i smiled back. something i like to do when nature takes my breath away, like she always does.

i didn’t know the “eyes” weren’t stars but they were the planets Jupiter and Venus aligning themselves during the first phase of the moon to form a smiley over the western sky.

i didn’t know that what i saw can only happen again in 2052.

2052 sounds so far away. like you need a time machine or a space shuttle to transport you there. we’d be older, then, that’s for sure. either that or we’d be dead. we just don’t know.

so you see, there are a lot of things that we don’t know — yet. astronomy is nothing but a molecular piece of it. our lives, and consequently our future, are much more complicated than the big bang theory. we never know what will happen but we take a step anyway. wake up to another day anyway. live anyway. so to waste huge portions of our life figuring out the minutest details of where and what exactly we want to be defeats life’s element of surprise. no matter how we color-code and alphabetically organize the files of our lives into compartments and divisions, we simply cannot tell what the universe has in store for us. period.

so let’s take the time to enjoy the little surprises that each day brings. open our eyes to the wonders of the world that we tend to take for granted. look up to the sky every now and then without expecting anything really. just marvel at how small and insignificant we are under heaven’s blanket. who knows? the sky might just be smiling down at us.

all we gotta do, simply, is to smile back.