THE CHALLENGE: WATCH THE SKIES PLEASE

I have always been drawn to watching the skies, not as a journalist first, but as a witness. There are moments when you look up and feel that what you are seeing cannot be fully explained, moments that stay with you long after the light fades. The sky holds mystery in a way nothing else does, and once you’ve felt that pull, it never really lets you go.

I’ve seen things I can’t explain—strange movements, strange lights, moments where logic arrives a second too late. They don’t feel frightening so much as humbling. They remind me that certainty is fragile, and that our understanding of the universe is still in its infancy. Not everything demands an answer right away; some experiences ask only to be held, quietly, with reverence.

Then there is the beauty. Comets carving silent arcs through the dark, appearing without warning and leaving us changed. They feel like messengers from deep time, older than history, reminding us that the universe has its own rhythms, independent of human lives. Watching one pass overhead feels intimate, as if the cosmos has leaned in close enough to be noticed.

Sunsets, too, have their own quiet power. The sky catches fire in colors that feel impossible, as though the world has briefly slipped its ordinary skin. In those moments, time loosens its grip. Awe takes over. The everyday becomes sacred, and it is easy to imagine that we are brushing against heaven and eternity at the same time.

These glimpses—of mystery, of beauty, of something vast and unknowable—are why I believe we are not alone. Not because I claim to understand what else may exist, but because the universe feels alive, expressive, and deeply present. The skies do not feel empty. They feel inhabited with meaning, layered with stories we are only beginning to sense.

So I offer a challenge: go outside and look up. Take your time. Get to know the sky intimately. Spend time with it whenever you can—in quiet moments, in passing glances, in long nights when sleep won’t come. Let your eyes adjust and your thoughts slow. Imagine falling into it. Watch long enough to feel the Earth moving through space, spinning and traveling beneath you while the stars remain, patient and distant. Ask yourself this: how often do you truly look up, just to take it all in?

In the end, with the universe so vast and we so small, isn’t it wonderful that we are anything at all? That out of all this darkness and distance, something learned to look back. We are the universe experiencing itself—briefly, imperfectly, and beautifully—yet we so rarely pause to notice, our noses buried in the immediacy of earthly life. To look up is to remember who we are: not separate from the cosmos, but made of it. Stardust with questions, consciousness wrapped in awe, here for a moment—and wise enough, if we choose, to witness it.

-Steve Douglass