The First Time You Looked Up at the Sky

I remember the exact feeling. Not the date, not how old I was, but the feeling of looking up at the sky and thinking, why can't that be mine too.

Not in a greedy way. In a genuine, almost painful way. The kind of want that sits right behind your ribs and doesn't really go away, it just gets quieter as you get older because life gets louder.

When we are kids, nobody has told us yet what we can't do. That's the most dangerous and the most beautiful thing about being small. You eat sand not because you're stupid, you eat sand because nobody told you yet that sand isn't food and you were curious and the world was just... available. Everything was available. You'd stick your finger in a switchboard. You'd jump off something way too high. Not because you didn't understand consequences but because consequences hadn't beaten you yet.

And in that same window of time that small, unrepeatable window you looked up at the sky and you thought, I want to go there.

Some of us wanted to be in space. Some of us wanted to be on a cricket field with thousands of people screaming and the whole country holding its breath. Some of us wanted to fly planes, paint mountains, run so fast it looked like we were falling forward. We wanted things that felt enormous and we didn't think twice about the wanting because we hadn't yet learned to shrink ourselves.

Then slowly, quietly, we did.

I'm not blaming anyone for that. That's just what happens. You grow up, you see how things actually work, you understand that wanting to be an astronaut and becoming one are two very different journeys and the second one asks for things time, money, geography, luck that not everyone gets handed. So you adjust. You find something else. As I choose engineering. Sometimes something genuinely good, sometimes something just okay, sometimes something that pays the bills and leaves you a little hollow at 11pm when the house is quiet.

And you think you've made peace with it. And mostly, you have.

But then.

You're sitting on a terrace somewhere and a plane cuts across the sky leaving that white line behind it and before you can stop yourself you feel it that same thing from when you were seven or nine or eleven. That pull. Not nostalgia exactly. More like a reminder that somewhere inside you there is still a person who once believed the sky had their name on it.

Here's the thing about the sky that I keep thinking about.

For most of human history it was completely, totally, humiliatingly out of reach. People looked up the same way we look up, with want, with awe, with that specific ache of something beautiful that isn't yours. And for thousands of years the answer was simply: no. The sky is not for you. You are made of earth, you stay on earth, that's the deal.

And then in barely a hundred years, a hundred years, which is nothing, which is your grandfather's lifetime, we didn't just reach the sky, we tore right through it. We put machines in orbit. We walked on the moon. We sent a car into deep space for no real reason other than because we could and it felt like something worth doing.

The sky that was impossible became a bus route.

And I don't say that to be glib. I say that because it means something about dreams specifically, the ones that seemed too large to even say out loud. The ones that made adults smile at you in that patient, slightly sad way. Those dreams, the enormous ones, the embarrassing ones, the ones you stopped telling people about — history has a strange habit of eventually catching up to them.

I never became an astronaut. I don't think I will. And there's a version of that sentence that sounds like defeat but I'm not sure it is, not entirely.

Because what I keep realizing is that the dream was never really about the job title. It wasn't about the NASA badge or the helmet or the press conference. It was about that feeling of being somewhere vast, of being small in a way that felt like freedom instead of failure, of looking back at something enormous and knowing you were brave enough to go toward it instead of away.

And that feeling. I think that's still available. Not in the form I imagined at seven. But the shape of it, the core of it, the reason I wanted it in the first place, that I haven't fully lost.

We carry our first dreams differently as we get older. Not in our hands where everyone can see them. Somewhere lower. Somewhere closer to the body. They become less like plans and more like a compass, they stop telling you exactly where to go and start telling you something quieter, something about who you are when nobody's watching and nothing's at stake.

So when was the last time you looked up?

Not checked the weather. Not complained about the heat. Actually looked up, the way you did when you were small and the sky was still a question you hadn't given up on yet.

It's still there. The sky hasn't moved. And neither, I think, has the part of you that first looked at it and felt something catch in your chest like a kite finding wind.

That part doesn't go away. It just waits.

It has always been very patient with us.