There are things that drift away like our endless, numbered days

Here is the first summary of my recent trip to Moab. This isn’t the fun report, this isn’t the description of the memories I made or the laughs we shared around the campfire. These are the melancholy, sobering thoughts that came to me while watching the stars from the dusty desert floor.

The first two nights of camping kept the stars hidden behind a thin veil of clouds, so it wasn’t until the third night of sleeping among the red rocks and dark skies that the stars came out in such an impressive display of cosmic beauty as to evoke the pensive state of mind in which I found myself. There, laying on the hard, rocky surface, I was wrapped up in a blanket of celestial lights so immense that I could feel myself being lost in the sheer grandeur of all that surrounded me. And that feeling of being lost brought with it a consciousness of how easily our lives can drift by us.

I realized that everything we had done that weekend, all of the fun things, every smile, every sunset, all of it, was drifting away from me and from reality into some other realm of the past. By tomorrow, everything might as well been a dream. I would have pictures to show that it happened, but those would be images of ghosts, depictions of times that have already passed away and drifted out of my life. I can’t go back to the beauty of the first desert sunset I saw on that trip. I can’t go back to the excitement of my freshman year at college or to the thrill of my first kiss. All of those experiences are gone and the scary part is that though for now we think that these days are endless and our opportunities unlimited, in fact they are quite numbered and with each passing day, that number grows smaller and smaller.

Sometimes you can almost feel life slipping through your fingers. You can see what you want be, how you want to live and who you want in your life, but you don’t know how to get there. It’s like being covered by that starry blanket that is so large that you cannot find the edge. At times it can feel overwhelming. It gives me such a sense of urgency to figure out my life and find what it’s missing as I continue to drift further and further into the future.

Yet despite these fears of the future, of losing and missing opportunities, the stars inspire a sort of confidence in what the future may bring. The vast expanse of magnificence in the desert sky brings out such a sense of awe as to seemingly whisper to us that everything will work out, and then gently coax us to sleep, just as any good blanket should. With that in mind, so begins a new day, a new opportunity and a new vision of what life can be.