I don’t know if it happens like a light bulb that comes on when you have a great idea, or more of a progressive realization, but I think everyone gets to a point in adulthood when they realize that they are now the adulty adult in the room, and being an adulty adult means you get to make adulty adult decisions.

True adulthood, of course, means dealing with the crap of life – back pain, hot flashes, the existential dread of navigating a changing world.

But…….

Being a grown-ass adult also means that when you get a bug up your butt about something, you have the grown up authority and autonomy to make executive decisions that may or may not be the most responsible choice for a work night.

Case in point: 9:00 PM in the middle of last week.

I’d just had two of the most emotionally taxing, rough days of my professional life. I’d seen entirely too much human suffering in the past few days, and I was emotionally, mentally, and spiritually spent.

I was about to get in the shower and go to bed when my phone rang.

My favorite trash panda was on the other end of the line, and I could practically hear them bouncing up and down in their kitchen as they told me about what they had just read online.

The reports were buzzing all over the PA astrophotography pages.

A massive geomagnetic storm was barreling toward Earth, scheduled to collide with our atmosphere between nine and midnight. The decree from the space-weather gurus was clear: Get out into the country, away from artificial light, find a high elevation, and look north. The Northern Lights should be visible.

I thought about doing the responsible thing – saying “oh that’s cool but we both have work tomorrow,” getting in the shower, and going to bed as planned, but in a moment of ‘fuck it, I need some fun after the few days I just had’, I decided to let my impulsive, hyperactive side take over for a couple of hours.

“Put your pajamas on,” I said. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. We’re having a car pajama party.”

It wasn’t just the impulsivity of my raging ADHD driving this split-second decision.

The beauty of being a fully cooked adult is that I’m able to recognize the holy imperative of a moment and act on it.

Half an hour later, clad in pajamas that couldn’t be passed off as anything BUT pajamas, and fueled by a nutritionally questionable haul of slushies and candy from Sheetz, we were driving up the north mountain into Perry and Juniata Counties.

If you’ve never navigated the back roads of rural Pennsylvania at midnight in your pajamas while actively dodging suicidal deer and highly defensive skunks, I highly recommend it. It’s a weird little thrill.

We were on a mission.

We weren’t tired, beat down ministers any more.

We were explorers.

Explorers with grown up money for smartphones with good cameras….and slushies.

We were adventurers chasing the Aurora Borealis.

We stopped a few times as we drove along the top of the North Mountain, cutting the headlights, stepping out into the cool air, and aiming our cameras toward the northern horizon.

Nothing.

Just the deep, velvet dark of the countryside.

Right around midnight, we pulled into a quiet church parking lot perched on the edge of a ridge. It felt appropriately sanctuary-like—hushed, vast, and entirely still.

We got out our cameras, fiddling with exposures, ISOs, and apertures, hoping to catch that elusive green or purple glow.

Nothing.

Not a glimmer.

As it turns out, the cosmic math was slightly off.

The geomagnetic storm was coming… it was just running on its own time, delayed by about five or six hours.

It wouldn’t actually end up reaching the atmosphere until just before dawn.

Now, being a grown-ass adult means you have the autonomy to buy blue raspberry slushies and go aurora hunting at midnight.

But it also means possessing enough self-awareness to know that that if you stay up until 5:00 AM on a weeknight, the next day your body will be the kind of tired no amount of coffee can fix.

We love the cosmos, but we also love our REM sleep and our ability to function without crying from exhaustion at our desks.

We weren’t mad, though.

There really is a beautiful sort of grace in accepting the universe’s timeline, even when it ruins our slushy-fueled plans.

Instead of packing up in frustration, we pivoted.

If the northern sky wasn’t going to put on a show for us, we would look straight up.

We leaned back against the hood of the car, turned our cameras directly above our heads, and started shooting.

To the naked eye, the sky was lovely, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Dark, vast, with the usual suspects of familiar constellations holding down the fort.

But as we adjusted the camera settings—balancing the exposures, tweaking the black points, letting the shutters drink in the darkness—something beautiful happened.

Our screens absolutely lit up.

What we captured was no less breathtaking than the northern lights would have been.

The sky on our screens was absolutely glittering.

An impossibly dense tapestry of diamonds—big, small, brilliant, and faint. We even managed to catch the sharp, silver streak of a shooting star cutting through the frame.

The camera didn’t create those stars; it simply revealed what was already there, hidden just beyond the threshold of our limited human biology. By adjusting our perspective, we were able to capture thousands of tiny, ancient points of light that had been quietly keeping us company the entire time.

We went up the mountain chasing the lights, and we found them – just in a different form than what we expected.

We go through so much of our lives chasing a very specific kind of light.

We look for the big, dramatic auroras—the sweeping career breakthroughs, the cinematic romantic moments, the grand, unmistakable signs that we are on the right path. We set our expectations toward a specific coordinate on the horizon, convinced that if we don’t see that particular manifestation of magic, our journey into the dark was a waste of time.

We want the sky to put on a show.

But the spiritual trick of navigating this human existence is learning how to adjust our internal aperture when the grand show doesn’t happen.

When the thing you planned for falls through, or the timing is completely off, the temptation is to drive home in the dark, disappointed by the empty horizon. Yet, if we have the presence of mind to change our focus, to look up instead of out, we often find that the world is already blindingly beautiful -and it’s always been there, just waiting for us to look for it.

The light we are looking for is rarely absent; it’s usually just waiting for us to calibrate our hearts to see it.

We can find it in the ridiculous joy of a midnight Sheetz run with a friend who doesn’t question your sanity when you yell “car pajama party” and decide to drive around in the middle of nowhere in the middle of night, taking pictures of the sky.

It’s in the moment when you’re almost crowded out of your own bed because your teenager and your dog both decide that your bed is the best place in the house to hang out on a Saturday morning.

We can even find it in the hard moments, when we show ourselves love and respect by holding our boundaries and living into our own values in meaningful ways.

The light can be found in the thousands of micro-blessings, small kindnesses, and quiet wonders that surround us every single day, completely invisible until we slow down, open our lenses, and let the wonder of the moment pour in.

We didn’t catch the auroras.

But we caught the universe looking right back at us, reminding us that sometimes, the light you find is what you were looking for all along.