His grandfather woke him in the middle of the night.
Not for anything special. Just to walk to the edge of the field, stand in the cold, and look up.
“Why so early?” he asked, half asleep.
“Because this is when they’re out,” the old man said.
“This is stupid. I can’t see a single star,” the young boy said and went back inside.
As he was walking back, his grandfather shouted after him, “Everyone wants the stars. Nobody wants the dark and the cold!”
Four days before his grandfather died, he gave him a small silver star on a chain. On the back, an engraving read: “Keep looking up.”
He didn’t understand what it meant until he was twenty-five.
That was the year everything went dark.
He wasn’t where he wanted to be in life. He had no money. People had stopped asking how he was doing, and it seemed like life had nothing left to offer him.
One night, unable to sleep, he went outside. The sky was empty, heavy clouds everywhere. The thermometer read -3 degrees.
He almost went back inside. Then he remembered what his grandfather had said to him:
“Everyone wants the stars. Nobody wants the dark and the cold!”
So he kept looking up. Still, no star was in sight. It took a long time, but then the clouds broke, and there they were.
The stars finally appeared.
~ KEEP LOOKING UP!