zushi's place

Prior to leaving Tucson Arizona, I took a last night walk near the house.

Tucson is an astronomy research town, meaning that both air pollution are light pollution are heavily restricted. Furthermore, perhaps by virtue of having lots of land, the skylines are completely unobstructed. As a result, the night skies in Tucson are exceptionally pretty. Barring truly rural or wild areas, you probably won't see that much stars anywhere else.

Wherever its safe, there's a sort of joy of Tucson night walks there that I have yet to find in all the places I've lived. As night falls, the concrete visual details of everyday objects melts away, and the scenery around you morph into ambiguous silhouettes that seem full of possibilities. The stars have a happy quality to them – there's just enough of them such that they never feel lonesome, every now and then you see some familiar constellations, and unlike their lifeless counterparts in urban centers, the stars themselves actually twinkle with cheerful energy. If you want to, you can have that night sky fill your entire visual field, even to the edge of the peripherals. When you listen for sounds, for some reason, even the crickets seem to crick happier in the cool night air.

After you take in that atmosphere for a while, you begin to feel a rush of freedom and wellbeing. The hassles, the concerns, the obligations of daytime completely evaporates, and you get the sense that there's nothing you need to do at all to be happy. It's just you and that beautiful night out there. You could do anything if you had wanted, but there's no urgency or need to anything – you can just do what makes you happy. There's a sense of limitless freedom, combined with a concrete feeling of safety, mixed with an appreciation of nature's beauty, and finally tinged with the excitement to explore the amazing world out there. It's a wonderful blend of feelings.

In my somewhat romantic imagination, that must have been what the native Aborigines felt as they explored the vast plains of pre-historic Australia, knowing that they were masters of the land, but at the same time struck by the beauty and the majesty of precisely the land that they behld. There's something about this that feels eminently right, like everything has clicked together, and you know that that is how things are supposed to feel in life.

That's precisely how good night walks in Tucson are.

Truth to be told, there are some stretches in life where I don't feel exactly happy – expectations don't pan out, annoyances get in the way, anxiety about the future piling up. But then I think about those types of happy, healthy, and wonderful experiences that I can have anytime, and it becomes eminently clear to me that the unhappy parts are results of deliberate choices I've made, for the purpose of pursuing other types of happiness.

When I realize that there's already a type of happiness that I could find anytime, those annoyances of life don't seem very concerning anymore. After all, the choices are entirely in my hands, and so I am always free to decide where I want to go.

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Categorized under: #irl