#17 - The Warm Feeling of the Light in Houses at Night

Or, considering the world as a comet

For a brief period of time, I lived near Monterey, CA. It wasn’t really a place I could easily afford, but it was a place I could afford to walk around and look at.

Monterey is perhaps best known for its gorgeous coastline and for being the filming location for the aquarium scenes in Star Trek V: The Voyage Home. There might be some other things, but I’m not really the expert on that.

What I do know is that it has a lot of pretty houses. I used to walk around and look at them, because walking is free.

Pretty houses hold no interest for a world-weary eye. I’d pass them on my walks to the store, to work, or just around town, and think they were cloyingly pretty—so much so that they became boring. Nothing interesting happening beneath the surface.

It wasn’t until I started walking around at night that I started appreciating just how beautiful these homes are. With the lights on, they were more than just pretty shells. They were living things. They were full of living things. They exuded life.

A house with its lights on smells like dinner in the oven; sounds like silverware clinking from an open kitchen window, or music drifting down from behind bedroom curtains.

When you walk by a house with its lights on at night, there’s a warmth to it, even on the coldest nights. It makes you feel less alone. A lit-up house suggests people gathered around a table, someone reading alone, or maybe two people sitting apart but together. Each one feels like a self-contained world, moving in its own way, yet still part of something larger. Maybe a comet feels something like this when it passes by the Earth.

A house is not a home until its lights are on.

I moved away from Monterey over a decade ago, but the attraction stuck.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at things as they appear. Taking the world at face value. I’ve been dismissing the possibility of things out of hand.

The world’s weird, and I don’t get it right now.

But thinking back to those lit-up houses, I’m reminded that things are rarely what they seem. Beyond the façade and bravado of daylight, life—like a house with its lights on—only reveals its true self when you bother to look for the glow.

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