Bright Lights, Big City

There's something wonderful about looking out at night over a city, all the little lights representing people and lives, whole existences separated from yourself and yet connected to you through this luminescence.

There's something wonderful about looking out over a great city at night and just marveling at what civilization has accomplished. From nothing, to this. Unimaginable toil and suffering and destruction and inequality.

But also, all of this stands witness to lifetimes upon lifetimes upon lifetimes of happiness and joy and revelations and love and peace and appreciation, and whole, whole extremes of the human experience. Cities hold within them magnitudes of life, teeming, over-flowing, rife with the human experience all compacted one on top of each other. So many thoughts, so many feelings, so many experiences... surely the meaning of life hides in there somewhere.

Surely one of those lights represents someone falling in love, appreciating love, savoring life, being raised to new heights, living a happily ever after.

There are undoubtedly people who, like all of us sometimes, are just going through the motions, are just passing time until chance or destiny might smile upon them again. But in cities with 500,000, one million, six million, 10 million people in them... surely one, if not some, if not several people might be experiencing some of those things in life that make us feel ALIVE. And there is an energy that comes out of that, that comes from being close to that, that comes from gazing upon it.

The country is a lovely place to be when you are happy with yourself, when you are happy with your life, when you want to be alone with your thoughts, or alone with the thoughts of a select few. But, for inspiration, for illumination, for the human experience beyond oneself, the city is clearly where it's at.