Stop What You’re Doing and Look Up

Psst.

Psst.

Hey you.

Yeah, you.

Look up for a moment. What do you see? Possibly a wall of some kind, maybe a window, maybe the entire expanse of a sunburned sky tucking the Earth into bed for the night. But look past that. Do you see it? Do you see it? Do you feel it?

Maybe you don’t, not yet, but you will. You will.

We Only See The Bottom Half of Life

Whether our cups are half-full or half-empty, we’re still only existing within half of it. There is another fifty percent of life’s capacity that we are disregarding entirely.

We spend so much time, necks craned, staring down at our phone screens, unaware that the world around us is a kind of high definition that no iPhone could contain. We waltz around, eyes transfixed on our feet, oblivious to the smiling strangers that pass us, the kids waving from the top deck of the bus, the restocked Cookie Crisp cereal boxes on the top shelf in Aldi. We live a life bound to the ground.

But it won’t be long until we’re buried deep below it.

Sure, we’re not all living with our heads hanging low. Most of us are staring straight ahead, striding forwards, and heading towards our goals. We’re taking steps, we’re making moves, we’re traveling and venturing and journeying along the very path that we’ve laid out for ourselves. But that’s still only staring along a horizontal axis.

Life is not linear though. There are four whole dimensions of unending awe at our disposal — yet we’re so often hung up on the 2D realm of the digital world, lost in our thoughts of the past, trapped inside this lower level of Earth’s atmosphere, and struggling to breathe.

What if we just stopped for a second and looked up?

Looking Up is the Reason I Have a Scar on My Arm

Two scars, actually. Parallel lines running along my elbow, the torn skin a shredded reminder of one of the best moments of my life.

I was at a mountainside campsite in France. My mom and I were heading out, strolling through the little car park, chattering away about Nutella and squeaky flip-flops and whether or not I’ll be able to download Love Island onto my iPad to watch in the tent later (spoiler alert; I did).

And the entire time my head was tilted backward, gaze locked on the colorful paragliders lobbing themselves off the peaks of the mountains surrounding us. I was so entranced so in love with the sight that I did not notice the car parking barrier we were walking beneath rapidly begin its descent upon my arm. Before I knew it, it had taken a chunk out of my skin.

But what I lost in flesh, I gained (tenfold) in overwhelming memories. Happiness is a healer it seems because I didn’t yelp out in bread (pain. Pain. Because I was in France? And it’s French for bread? You get it), instead I threw my head back even further and burst into laughter. I was looking right up into the heart of the sky, stood near the crest of an Alp, the rest of the world fading into the background below me. I was alive and living in the moment. I was looking up.

It sounds silly, but looking up can change your life. Because it means stopping, just for a second, and being still. You can’t stare at the sky whilst bumbling about your busy life (I mean, you can, but you are likely to walk into a hell of a lot of lampposts. And I will laugh every time you do). You have to be stationary, you have to be motionless, you have to be okay with stopping.

And that is something we as a species are pretty damn bad at doing.

*Spice Girls Voice* Stop Right Now, Thank You Very Much

Life is short. And life is fast. We spend our finite days here rushing through the motions, chasing after dreams and paychecks and the ice-cream van. We feel guilty if we decide to nap rather than learn Russian. We feel unproductive if we watch TV instead of our weight. We feel like bad people if we’re tapping away at our piano keys composing melodies instead of tapping away at our laptop key composing emails.

We think rest is a sin. We think breaks mean we’re broken. We think stopping means dying. But it doesn’t. Trust me on this. And if you don’t, then try it for yourself.

Stop right now. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, as long as you’re not in the middle of crossing a busy New York street (and if you are, then please start choosing a better location to catch up on your Medium reads, you know? Try Pizza Hut. Works for me), then just stop. And look up.

Don’t do anything else but look — and really see what you’re seeing. Notice the details. Trail the lines of life with your eyes. Stare, hard. Even if there’s a ceiling above you, think beyond that. No matter what you’re looking up at, there is always a sky that lies just above.

So look up. Look up and out into space and imagine, imagine what’s out there, imagine what’s coming your way. Imagine other parts of the planet, connected by this very same sky, and what stories might exist there.

Think about all the possibilities, not just of the Earth but the entire cosmos unfolding from the very place in which you’re stood. Think about who you are and who you can become. Or don’t think at all. Just stare. Stare at the moon. Admire the clouds. Blink back the sunlight. Look up.

We don’t have long on this Earth, but that doesn’t mean we can’t stay in one moment for a little while. Sometimes that’s exactly why we need to. To truly appreciate it before it dissipates into the past.

If we stop for just a second and look up — we’ll notice that life is lobbing itself at us from all around. If we stand there on our French mountainsides and gaze up at the sky, we’ll spot these colourful moments strapped to powerful opportunities gliding right on over to us. We just need to be still long enough to see them coming.

So please, I beg of you, stick your head in the clouds and breathe life in. You won’t regret it, you just need to try it, for one single moment: stop. And look up.

That’s where the stars live.