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<\/p>\nLast week I had a friend for dinner, and she convinced me to do one of her favorite activities afterward: lie on the grass in the park and look at the sky.<\/p>\n
I was hesitant because I don\u2019t like to lie down until nighttime, when the only goal is to end the day by losing consciousness. (My friend loves lying down for almost any reason.)<\/p>\n
I also felt like I already know how that activity goes. Clouds drift prettily across the sky, sometimes looking like a face or a car, then turning into something else. Kind of neat but not worth making a special trip.<\/p>\n
She insisted though, so we went, and it was the highlight of my week. I\u2019ve been back twice since. Now I\u2019m an evangelist for vertical sky-looking. It should be at least as popular as going to art galleries, scuba diving, or other kinds of recreational looking.<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n Lying on the grass and looking straight up at the sky is an entirely different activity than looking at it horizontally<\/em>, along its bottom. Horizon-looking is often pleasant, especially at sunset, but it\u2019s not the same thing at all.<\/p>\n Parking your body horizontally, preferably on soft grass, lets you square up to the sky and study it patiently. In this posture, you\u2019re looking it in the face<\/em>, maybe for the first time in years. Only when you look the sky in the face can you comprehend its true proportions. It is positively huge, occupying 100% of your field of vision. It\u2019s the biggest thing you will ever see.<\/p>\n When you look at it directly, the sky is surprisingly active. Clouds bunched on the horizon barely seem to move. But when you square up to their plane of travel, you see how much twirling, drifting, and billowing is going on all the time. \u00a0<\/p>\n Without the ground as a reference, you can sense how deep the sky is. Some clouds are immense, physically bigger than mountains. A serious thunderhead can be ten miles tall, triple the base-to-summit height of Everest. But even the biggest clouds are dwarfed by the ocean of blue space behind them. Somehow the human brain is equipped to perceive this depth if you look right into it.<\/p>\n From your horizontal position, the earth isn\u2019t visible, but you can sense it. As my friend pointed out, you can feel its immensity behind you while you look outward, as if you\u2019re wearing it as a gargantuan backpack.<\/p>\n With the earth out of the picture, you can just as easily imagine you\u2019re looking down<\/em> at this ocean of space, suspended against a grass ceiling by a life-saving magnetic force.<\/em> This is basically true. Every direction in space is as \u201cdown\u201d as it is anything else. When your mind lets you see the sky as beneath you, you feel the great height in your loins, like you\u2019re looking down through swirling clouds from the top of the Matterhorn. You\u2019re hanging up here, from your invisible backpack-straps, looking down into the deepest abyss of all.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.raptitude.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/scubalooking.jpg\")
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