On a late night in my room with a sleep-deprived head, I looked out the window only to be startled by what appeared to be a platoon of seven planes floating through the sky in unsettling unison. I was mesmerized by the executed coordination but was shaken awake by a mindless thought that the planes might be hostile. For a split second, a scenario played out in my head — I was running away from something much bigger than myself for reasons I did not know. The unreasonable yet valid momentary fear that took over my consciousness taught me a lesson I never had — you never know where your story ends for absolutely no reason.

If you are a person who likes movies, you will know why a premature end can be scary. With a premature ending, you don't get a conclusion; most storylines that your life started may not even reach the exposition. Your life is not a planned route, but rather a dynamic graph where you set consequent points with each decision you make. At that moment, when you understand that life is truly short, the risk of it being cut even shorter is scarier than the anticipation of the rest of it playing out no matter how bad you might be feeling now. It puts your life into a two-dimensional perspective and you realize that despite the huge chunk of it being plotted, your XY graph is limitless as long as you keep plotting.

Our human tendency to simplify complex matters and attempt to predict their outcome is of course something that makes us intelligent but also something that makes us unhappy. Think about it — if you do your job and get your paycheck, would you be as happy as you would be if you thought you worked for free and somebody just gave you the money as a gift? It's the parity and disparity between our expectations and reality that spike or suppress our feelings. There is no regression to summarize how our life will go, while our expectations are nothing but our subjective perspectives, our attempts to predict the future… And at that moment, when the plane septet became merely a large cloud drifting through the sky, perspective cleared up for me.

Sure, planning the future is important and so is a rough evaluation of the potential consequences of our actions, but how far-looking are we supposed to be? Expectations are reflections of our desires, and when they are not fulfilled, we get disappointed. Is the disappointment of seeing an unfavorable result as large as the disappointment of not seeing a result at all?

As I kept staring at the cloud high up in the sky, my gaze started to narrow, and I no longer noticed the ground below my feet. All I "saw" was a pitch-black endless sky, seven specks of light, and a cloud spanning 60% of my view floating away. As my focus began to fade, and my eyes fixed, I felt my breath taken away as it seemed like the cloud stayed in place, and I was the one shifting away on a giant spinning globe. I could see the treetops in my view, and the city lights polluting the sky, but stunningly only then did I notice the curve of the horizon.

The realization of the fact that we live on a massive planet in a world of our own making doesn't come as often as we would expect. The thought itself is almost frightening; you look outside the window, and it's not the sky you are looking at but endless space, and perhaps at every point of that space there is something infinitely larger than you. You realize how big the world is and that your immediate surroundings, although define your environment, are not everything there is to live for. And it's almost as if your worries are swept away — there is no anxiety, no deadlines, and no plans either. For a moment you feel truly alive, and you become aware of this in the most definite way possible. You realize that ultimately you have control over yourself, your body, and your mind. The worries swept away simply returned to where they came from — from beyond your reach… on a giant spinning globe.