The moment that changed my life

By Aiyana Bhatia

The summer of 2019 will always be a very special season for me. I went to Ladakh with my parents, and for the first time in my life, I noticed the world above me. The plethora of celestial bodies above my head was so mesmerising. I realised that I had never looked up at the sky and wondered what exactly the moon, the planets, and the stars are. It makes you realise how minuscule you really are in comparison to the universe, which is unimaginably vast.

The journey to reach Ladakh was very tiresome. My head was pounding, and I felt nauseous. I had no energy to venture outside, so I was sitting cosily in my quilt. My dad spent hours outside while I was watching TV in my warm room. I had no interest in anything outside, even though it was a completely new and wonderful world that we had just entered. However, my dad spent hours outside, and he returned excitedly, asking me to join him. I resisted leaving my warm bed for the cold and harsh weather outside. It took some coaxing, but my father finally succeeded.

He pointed up to the sky, and I was speechless. I looked up, and there was no dark spot in the sky. It was filled completely with twinkling dots. I had never seen so many stars in Noida. My father started showing me various constellations and their shapes, and eventually, I understood why my father spent so many hours outside adoring the view. We were lucky to have also seen the International Space Station (ISS) with our naked eyes hurtling through the sky above us. It was incredible. I realised that I had never seen things so beautiful and mystical.

The view above seemed pregnant with meaning, and soon it dawned on me why so many civilisations in the world were obsessed with these tiny sparkling dots. It was the highest form of knowledge, and to this day, space is the highest scientific pursuit of mankind.

We ended up spending more than 3 hours standing under the canopy of the Milky Way in the biting cold of the highest plateau on earth, and somehow I didn’t even feel it. That’s when I realised how much I would have missed.

Since I have come back, I find myself to be a different person. My sphere of awareness appears to be enhanced, and my mental world feels larger. I seem to have a better perspective of things than before as I now try to see the whole rather than just its parts. I feel this is a fundamental change in my outlook, a change so fundamental that it might even be hard for me to enunciate in how many different ways over the future course of my life it will change the way I interact with the world.

I feel connected to our ancestors who shared the same fascination for this mysterious connection between the heavenly bodies and our mundane lives. As I open out my being to these sparkles in the sky, I feel an indescribable connection to the world and the universe around me.

And in those moments, I feel at peace!