Why founders should see the stars
I have never seen the night sky (in its fullest) before. And when I did, it was eye-opening.
My sister, Shrina Kurani and her husband Marius von Essen are big hiking folks. They go out on 5 day excursions on the PCT (Pacific Coast Trail) and head out to hard to reach locations where there is no cell coverage and no light pollution.
If you have never seen the Milky Way before, I totally recommend you do. And if you’re a founder — I’d suggest it twice.
Why?
I was humbled. I forgot about the Slack messages, the e-mails, the minutae. This may sound a bit ‘new wave’, but when I looked up — I thought about all the other people that were looking up that night, everyone that had previously looked up in all of humanity, and the stories and signs that we see from the stars.
Our Trip
The trip started out in San Francisco, and our camping site was a small campground in the city of Sage Hen and from there, we were to head to Massacre Rim (which is BLM, Bureau of Land Management) land.
Sage Hen
Sage Hen has some of the darkest skies second to Massacre Rim. Marius has some images here, that I’ll update here shortly.
Massacre Rim
Massacre Rim is a Dark Sky Sanctuary, which allows you to see the dark sky in it’s fullest. You see, our light pollution drowns out the night sky, because the stars just really can’t compete with our artificial city lights.
So whats the big deal, it’s just the night sky
I’ve been reading a ton on story-telling and looking at the world around me, in typical Harari fashion, you begin to really see that Sapiens have done nothing more than to craft narratives to explain the world around us.
What does the night sky have to do with Sapiens?
We’ve been ‘looking up’ since we’ve existed. We know this because we have the Zodiac, sun dials, the lunar calendar, even entire epics and religions that are based with Gods that live in the sky.
Popularly, Heaven is in the sky.
It’s been untouched territory for us.
We’ve navigated using stars, put the Star of Bethlehem on top of the Christmas tree, which guided the Three Wisemen to find Jesus in a Manger.
Once you realize how much of our world has been shaped and story-told from the sky, you begin to see the power of looking up.
Theres also an interesting thing that happens, if you look up at the night sky and observe the Milky Way. You actually begin to see the negative space in the sky instead of the clusters of stars.
It pulls you out. It makes you feel small. It gives you the overview effect. It’s in our DNA and coming back to the office, I feel like I just had a few more neurons that were connected. I felt like I had just taken a nice warm shower.
Try it, and post in the comments how you feel.
Music I was listening to while I wrote this
This is day 23 of my #90DayOfProse challenge.
