Starlab

Stargazing here makes me feel a wash of humbling smallness in the most wonderful way. Drinking in the tranquility somehow makes anxieties and problems entirely fade into insignificance.

This momentary hiatus of human trivialities, for me, emerges both from the aesthetic impact of a breathtaking vastness, and the romanticized wonder that otherworldly views inspire. It is a platform to peer into a far larger landscape.

Growing up in New York City I never saw the stars. There were always one or two of the brightest that somehow shined through the smoggy light-polluted atmosphere, but the night sky hardly felt like a meditative void.

What I did have instead was something indescribably sacred: a once-a-year sampling of the stars via an inflatable planetarium installed in my school’s gymnasium. Starlab.

We would crawl through an external tube into a pitch-black dome as our science teacher Rebecca softly instructed us to lie on our backs and gaze up into the darkness.

And we would close our eyes. And the projector was flipped on. And what transpired was pure bliss.

Rebecca would speak about the vastness of space, telling stories of constellations and galaxies and star systems beyond ours.

There were seams and wrinkles in the structure, and someone undoubtedly pulled your hair in the process, but the experience was entirely full of awe.

And yet, as with the real thing, the suspended moment of Starlab was only ever a pause. The meditative moment was followed by a return to the banal, as we readjusted, wide-eyed and whispering, back to into a world of routines and reality.

In my memory this structure was colossal, dwarfing my elementary school self.