Kris Rafferty | The Closer You Look, The More Likely It’s Not There

I love my mother. Arguably, she’s the person who knows me most because she’s seen the arch of my life choices from my beginning to now, from a perspective of outside looking in…unconditional love and worry assuring her focus. Having said that, she’s appropriated the right to a certain level of criticism not acceptable coming from my husband or children. They know better. Simply put, as the old adage goes, if mom isn’t happy, no one is happy—my husband and children quite rightly pick their battles. Whereas my mother has nothing to lose when she tells me something I don’t want to hear, so she’s free with whatever is on her mind. (I mentioned I love her, right?) We talk a lot, reminisce, beat dead horses, and struggle to find the good in the bad, and over the years I’ve noticed a phenomenon unique to talking with her.

We remember things differently.

We have shared memories, but remember them as if filmed by different directors,
cut by different editors, written in different genres by different authors. What
I credit to be a personal moment of transformation in my past, never happened
for my mother. Did. Not. Happen. This disconnect challenges events I’ve long
credited for creating who I am, and my mother’s denial of these events boggle my
mind. How could this happen? Was this simply a situation where two people, with
different perspectives, different priorities, different developmental stages in
life saw the world and its microcosm-level events differently? And like a
Polaroid, as it developed before our eyes, was set in her mind and mine as two
different snapshots of an event? Then we filed it away, never to challenge it
until mom and I had one of our conversations?

I don’t know. But…

I was surfing the web and tripped over Forbes Magazine’s online “Ask Ethan: How Many Stars In The Night Sky Still Exist?” August 20, 2016. Being a science nerd, I couldn’t not read it. Spoiler alert. Most of them…but that still means some aren’t there! The article goes on to explain that it requires amplification of human eyesight (lenses) to see the light from these dead stars…these stars that don’t exist…and the farther away we look, the more likely we are to see them.

Wow.

Astrophysicist and author Ethan Siegel is less impressed with this than I. He
writes, “But even on average, if we were to consider all 200-400 billion stars
in our galaxy, a mean distance of perhaps 40,000 light years away, there are
perhaps only a few hundred thousand that are already dead — one in a million —
and they’re heavily skewed towards being on the far side of the galaxy from
where we are.” Yet if you believe no two snowflakes are alike, I think one in a
million is an incredibly mind blowing ratio when you consider there are between
200-400 Billion stars. So, yeah…I’m impressed.

So there you have it. The closer you look toward the stars, the more likely you
will see stars that aren’t there. So why would it be any different with me and
my mom? The closer we study our mutual past, the more likely we see things that
aren’t there. It then behooves us to accept that two people with two different
realities can still be correct. We see the star, yet it doesn’t exist, fighting
that conclusion is to fight scientific data that took over tens of thousands of
man hours, millions, if not billions of dollars, countless theorems created,
equipment invented and built, rockets launched, space stations, and of course
government bureaucracies created to make it all possible. Is anyone surprised to
discover it would take that much time, money and effort to explain the
relationship between a mother and a daughter? Thank you, NASA. Well done.