It’s Always The Same Moon

It’s mid-autumn in the lunar calendar today. The moon is extremely bright. There are few clouds around; the sky looks vast and empty except for a lone ring gently shining.

I’ve been standing outdoors looking up at this pristine celestial sight, and a thought keeps going around in my head. Everyone looks at the same moon.

Every human being around the world will see the full moon today. A kid is pointing at the sky telling his mother excitedly “mum, look how bright the moon is!“. A young couple in love somewhere is sitting on a beach, in front of the moonlight reflecting off the sea and the sound of waves caressing the shore. A hundred thousand years ago, a tribe of cavemen stared at the sky in silent awe, at the sight of the very same moon I’m gazing at. They probably did not have language to describe their emotions then, but I’m sure they must have experienced the same sense of curious wonder and existential crisis that I’m feeling now.

It is a wonder that no matter who you are, where you stand in this world, or when you were born in the span of history, the moon has always been the moon. It is a rock floating in space reflecting light from the sun, and yet billions of souls have looked at it, all with similar thoughts and feelings running through their mind. And even more wondrous is that 50 years ago, a man landed on the moon! It still gives me chills to think about how a group of primates were able to band together to escape their own planet on rocket fuel and touch down on another celestial body.

The sight of the moon also inspires in me a sense of existential crisis. This space rock was born 4.5 billion years ago and it has witnessed the entire history of the Earth. The moon has seen every continent forming and breaking, every step of the evolution of life, every mass extinction event. On that scale of time, my existence — heck, the entire history of humankind — probably constitutes a blink of the moon’s eye in its 24-hour day.

It Has Always Been The Same Moon

I don’t think any human being can stare at the magnificence of a full moon’s sky and not have their breath taken away in a moment of awe and wonder. No matter who you are — young, old, man, woman, black, white, yellow — looking up at the moon must be one of the most universal human experiences. In front of the cosmos, we are all more similar than different.

Also, I think it is helpful to keep in mind that it has always been, and will always be the same moon. For billions of years that there has been, our collective human existence barely registers a millisecond to it. The moon will just keep being… the moon. Millennia from now, long after we — the current generation of humans — are all gone, posterity will still be looking at this same heavenly wonder. The sight the moon is a powerful lesson of humility that reminds us of our insignificance in the grand scheme of things.