“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” ~J.R.R. Tolkien
It was my son’s fifteenth birthday. His basketball game got canceled, so my wife, my son, and I climbed back into the car a bit disappointed and started the drive home.
We were just heading back to the house as we always did after games. My wife was mid-sentence when something caught my eye before she could finish it. There was an orange light in the sky.
I almost didn’t say anything. It seemed like it might be a plane, and I didn’t want to interrupt. But something about it was different.
It wasn’t blinking. It wasn’t moving the way planes move. And then it started leaving a streak, a long, blazing trail that burned across the dark sky.
I said, “Hey, what’s that?” and all three of us looked up through the windshield in the same moment. It moved across the sky for a few seconds and then got smaller and disappeared.
We pulled out our phones and found what we already suspected. A meteor, probably, maybe a fireball. We had guessed as much.
But knowing the word didn’t change what we’d felt watching it cross the sky. The way each of us had gone quiet at the same moment, like something in us recognized it before our minds did.
Science can tell you what a thing is. It can’t tell you why it finds you when it does. We drove the rest of the way mostly quiet, that streak of light still playing in our minds.
We got home, lit the candles, and cut the cake. After our son blew out the flames and made a wish, I wondered what he was hoping for while my wife pulled up old photos. One minute we were eating, and the next we were passing the phone around the table, looking at pictures we hadn’t seen in years.
There was my son at four years old, cheeks round, grinning at something off camera. There we were at the beach, all of us squinting into the sun. We laughed at our haircuts and the bathing suits we thought looked cool at the time.
But underneath the laughter there was something else, something that left us breathless and a little undone. We tried to fend off that feeling by saying things like, “Look how little you were,” and “I can’t believe that was so long ago.” At one point we just sat there for a moment without saying anything, each of us looking at the same picture, feeling the same thing.
How did we get here so fast? Where did all that time go? You look around at the people you love, and the only thing you really want, the thing underneath all the wishes and candles, is just for everyone to be okay.
But none of us knows what the future holds, and sitting there with cake on our plates and a meteor still fresh in our memories, I felt the pain of that truth more than usual.
I’ve been sitting with questions since that night. Was there meaning in that orange flash? Was the universe offering us something, or was it just a random event?
I don’t know. And I’ve made a kind of peace with not knowing. What I do know is that beauty is everywhere if we’re paying even a little attention.
Seeing a meteor with your family is the kind of thing that makes you stop and wonder what else might be out there. These moments don’t announce themselves and don’t ask permission. They just appear, out of nowhere, in the middle of a drive home.
But on that same drive you might hear on the news about people being killed in a place far away or not so far away. You might see an old man sitting alone at a table in a lit window as you pass and wonder who he’s missing. You might hold someone you love and know, somewhere inside, that you won’t always be able to.
The same magical world that offers you a blazing light in the sky also carries unexplainable suffering, sometimes within the same hour, sometimes within the same mile. This is the part I find hardest yet most necessary to hold. Life is wonderful and terrible at the same time.
Most of us are never taught how to carry that. We’re taught to fix things, to find silver linings, to move forward. But some things ask only to be acknowledged.
The meteor was there, whole and bright and burning through the dark, whether we understood it or not. The brokenness in the world was there too. Both were true on the same night under the same sky.
I don’t think we’re meant to resolve that tension so much as learn to live inside it. To let the beauty be beautiful without needing it to cancel out the pain. To let the grief be present without letting it swallow the light.
That’s not a solution. It’s something more demanding than a solution. It’s a practice, and some days it’s harder than others.
But I think it’s the only way to be fully alive to your own life, to drive home after an evening that didn’t go as you’d hoped it would, look up, and see what’s there.
My son turned another year older on the night we saw that meteor cross the sky. We didn’t plan it, and we weren’t watching for it. We were just driving home from a canceled basketball game, and something wonderful arrived.
I don’t know if it meant anything. But I know it was there, and I know we saw it together. And I know that the same world that can break your heart can also set the sky on fire.
About Daniel H. Shapiro
Dr. Daniel H. Shapiro is keynote speaker, author, and mentor. He is passionate about human connection and the stories we carry with us. For more information about his book, The 5 Practices of the Caring Mentor, or his mentoring and speaking services, check out yourinherentgoodness.com.
