Every star dies sooner or later. After shining for millions or billions of years, it eventually runs out of energy. Some stars end their lives with violent explosions, flaring briefly but brilliantly. Most, however, simply fade away.
But the light emitted during a star’s lifetime continues its journey through space long after the star’s internal flame has gone out, illuminating the sky like a memory, flickering but not forgotten.
If the Sun suddenly vanished we wouldn’t even notice until its final photons arrived eight minutes later – the time it takes light to travel from the Sun to the Earth. For more distant stars, it can take eons for their last rays of light to reach us.
Looking into the night sky it’s hard to know which stars still shine and which are already dead; they’re indistinguishable to the eye. The light of dead stars fills the heavens, the past masquerading as the present.
One hundred years from now most of us will be forgotten. Yet, like stars, we have the opportunity to illuminate the darkness with our glow while we’re alive and even after we’re gone.
By following our dreams with passion, sharing our love with family and friends, and living life to the fullest each day rather than waiting for some imagined future when things will be better, we’ll leave the world a brighter place than when we arrived. We might not be stars, but we can shine.
“I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist.”
At this moment, somewhere in the distant universe, the light from a now-dead star still twinkles in the night sky. But this star is different from the others – it’s one that gave birth to you and me by creating the oxygen, carbon, iron and other atoms that eventually became the raw material for our bodies and our planet. Vanished forever from our view, it still shines far away in someone else’s sky.
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