Universal Perfection
Have you ever experienced a moment of piercing clarity—a quiet knowing that we’re all integral parts of something much bigger than we’ve dared to imagine?
For me, it usually arrives when I least expect it. I’ll be caught up in life’s familiar rhythms when something unusual happens and my world tilts.
In that moment, the familiar curtain of everyday life parts, revealing the universal perfection hidden just beyond it.
The first time it happened, I was nine. Summer’s heady days had arrived, which meant no school and long stretches of daylight when dinner morphed from an end-of-day event to a minor pit stop before dashing back outside to play until dark.
On that particular evening, as dusk settled and the summer air cooled, my friends disappeared into the night one by one, their parents’ voices carrying their names across the neighborhood.
Soon, only my friend Eric and I remained, perched on the swings in my backyard. Perhaps our parents were distracted and lost track of time. No one called our names, so we stayed.
For some reason, our usual banter gave way to serious conversation beneath a brightening field of stars. As the sky deepened, so did our awe. Suddenly, we both stopped talking and simply stared into the cosmos as if we’d lost our voices.
Perhaps it would be more dramatic to say a star shot across the night sky like a silver blade slashing through black velvet from the other side, but that didn’t happen. Instead, a living silence gathered around us. It grew so loud I could almost hear it.
In that moment, an inexplicable peace descended, and I knew I belonged within an immense, interlocking puzzle. A puzzle of staggering complexity and perfection. A puzzle I could never disrupt, even if I tried.
I don’t know what thoughts tumbled through Eric’s head, but I sensed he felt it too. For a long time, we kept our eyes on the heavens, neither of us willing to disturb the silence.
Since then, those moments have come often enough to sustain me, but never so often that their magic feels ordinary.
I’ve come to think of those moments as the universe sweeping through me—a wave of perfection that lifts and carries me, then returns me to the familiar shore of everyday life.
Lately, memories of those fleeting encounters with perfection have resurfaced. One came shortly after that conversation on the swing set, when I stepped onto my front porch at night for no reason beyond a compelling need to be outside.
A low-hanging moon greeted me, full and bright. Then, before my eyes, an advancing shadow swallowed it in a total lunar eclipse I hadn’t known was coming.
Another came on the fantail of a naval destroyer, when more than three hundred dolphins raced toward our ship in long, graceful arcs—an experience I wrote about in Summer—School Part 2.
Then there was the night on Mount Rogers. At two a.m., I heard footsteps outside the tent I shared with my wife. I burst through the flap, convinced the strange man we’d encountered earlier had found us in the secluded clearing where we had deliberately pitched camp, well off the hiking trail.
Earlier that morning, he stopped us near the trailhead, showed us his homemade bowie knife, and asked where we planned to camp that night. But instead of a knife-wielding madman, I came face-to-face with four wild horses and a colt.
They stood in our camp, blond manes spilling over auburn coats. Their calm eyes asked why we’d invaded their spot. I stared at them. They stared at me. None of us moved for a long time. Once again, the universe swept through me.
There’s a reason I’ve been thinking about these moments lately. I finally recognized a single thread running through them, and I’m astonished that it took so long to see it:
They all happened outdoors.
Not once has that universal perfection swept through me indoors.
Yet I spend far too much time indoors, where these moments have never found me. Perhaps today’s unseasonable warmth is no coincidence. A seventy-one-degree day this late in November feels like a rare gift—a chance to turn my face toward the sunlight and make myself available to wonder again.
