The Firefly, Me, and Change

A few months ago, I had a diving company with a substantial operation: employees, boats, equipment, customers, obligations, regulators, and an impressive collection of bills that, unlike the customers, never failed to show up.

Today, my wife and I live in a tent about 900 meters above sea level, on a mountain in Nova Friburgo, Brazil, surrounded by the Atlantic Forest.

It may sound as though something went terribly wrong.

Maybe it did.

The curious part is that something may also have gone right.

Before the tent, there was a company

The company lasted sixteen years. We offered recreational scuba diving. It started in Arraial do Cabo, on the coast of Rio de Janeiro state, grew, opened two operations in nearby Armação dos Búzios, and reached the point where I was in São Paulo preparing a fourth venture, aimed primarily at bringing customers from there to dive on the Rio de Janeiro coast.

For years, we were among the companies certifying the most recreational divers in Brazil. At times, we ranked first. When the market for courses began to change, we shifted more of our energy toward introductory scuba experiences—what Brazilians commonly call mergulho de batismo—and captured a large share of that local market, too.

The company grew.

And growth has a curious feature: everything gets bigger.

Revenue gets bigger.

The operation gets bigger.

The possibilities get bigger.

And the problems, displaying remarkable team spirit, grow right along with them.

Then came the pandemic, debt, and regulatory changes in Arraial do Cabo that reduced operating capacity precisely during the busiest periods. The company reorganized. Then it reorganized again. And again.

Businesses quickly learn a skill that is also deeply human: calling survival strategic planning.

In May of last year, a new crisis began. It wasn’t just ours. Boating tourism and recreational diving in the region took a serious hit. Our revenue fell to roughly half its previous level and showed no inclination to come home.

A small company can sometimes weather a drop like that by shrinking. When the operation is larger, so is the inertia. Employees, properties, boats, maintenance, obligations, and expenses don’t immediately get the memo that revenue has decided to disappear.

For almost a year, we kept cutting back, adapting, making up the difference, trying again.

Until, in April, I’d had enough.

There was no cinematic scene. No sad music started playing. I didn’t stare out a window while rain, thoughtfully arranged by the production crew, ran down the glass.

I simply decided to close.

After sixteen years, I realized I no longer wanted to spend the next sixteen reorganizing the company to make up for the previous reorganization.

We closed the locations. Gave back the properties. Dismantled the operation. An alternative emerged that would let a small part of the business continue on a much more hands-on basis, the way many companies in the industry had always worked: less infrastructure, fewer people, the owner personally serving customers, organizing things, diving, and working behind the counter.

But I was already somewhere else before I even moved.

An unusual trade

As the company scaled down, my involvement in the operation and my income became much smaller. There were still old obligations to settle and assets to sell.

In the process, I traded an intangible business asset for a piece of land in Nova Friburgo.

That isn’t exactly a sentence you find in management textbooks.

Nova Friburgo is in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro state. The name isn’t a Brazilian attempt to sound European: the city grew out of a Swiss colony established in the early nineteenth century and was named after Fribourg, Switzerland. Other immigrant groups arrived later, and the city developed a history of its own among the mountains.

My land sits at roughly 900 meters above sea level. The summit rises to nearly 1,200 meters. We’re on a plateau, with the Atlantic Forest sloping down in front of us into a ravine.

And since I didn’t yet have enough money to build a house, we made a very practical decision.

We bought a tent.

So that’s how a company with multiple locations, employees, and boats ended up, by a route no strategic plan would dare present at a meeting, with its former owner living in a tent on a mountain.

There’s a certain elegance to it.

Especially the absence of meetings.

Human resources now includes chickens

The idea isn’t just to live somewhere different. It’s to try a different way of organizing life.

We’ve already planted about two dozen fruit trees. I studied the soil, picked locations, watched the sun, shade, and water, and began placing around the property what, if things go reasonably well, will eventually stop being seedlings and start being dessert.

We’re preparing a vegetable garden. Sweet potatoes, potatoes, carrots, and other foods should become part of the system. We’re considering a small chicken coop. Six hens could already supply a respectable number of eggs.

And there’s a very straightforward career path.

If a hen performs well, she stays on the team.

If the time comes for restructuring, unlike at multinational corporations, “heads will roll” may be meant literally.

Probably served with rice and farofa, Brazil’s toasted cassava-flour side dish.

We’re also thinking about a small fishpond. In the mountain climate, trout looks like a particularly interesting possibility. There’s spring water nearby, we have solar panels, and we’ve also connected to the power grid. The idea is to combine solutions, not compete in the world championship of self-sufficiency.

I’m not planning to manufacture my own screws, cast my own pots, or discover electricity all over again.

I just want to reduce the number of things I need to buy to keep living and, above all, the amount of my life I need to sell to keep buying things.

That difference looks small on the page.

In practice, it can take up an entire lifetime.

The fruit will ripen at different times. We’ll eat what we eat. My wife may turn the surplus into preserves, and perhaps sell some on a small scale.

But there is one important rule: five years from now, there will be no meeting to announce the launch of the International Mountain Preserves Division.

I’ve been a business owner long enough.

I don’t want to turn every enjoyable activity into another operation that has to grow to pay for the operation built to make its growth possible.

Before the mountain, a hillside

This wasn’t, incidentally, my first attempt to change the scenery and see whether changing it might rearrange something inside me, too.

When I returned to Arraial do Cabo, having previously lived in an oceanfront penthouse with a pool and in a three-story house with a pool and household staff, I decided to move to Morro da Cabocla, a hillside community in Arraial.

I could have rented another conventional place. Perhaps not at the same standard as before, but I could have. Choosing the hillside wasn’t simply a financial spreadsheet winning an argument.

I wanted change.

And I found it.

The ocean view was still there, proving that the ocean, fortunately, hadn’t yet introduced income-based access tiers. But almost everything else worked differently.

People knew each other better. Help circulated with less ceremony. Life happened closer to the front door. There was less room for that quiet competition in which entire neighborhoods seem to be taking part in a championship whose rules nobody received, but in which everyone has to demonstrate that they’re doing very well.

And there were children in the street.

Children flying kites, running, inventing games, and being summoned home through a communication system of extraordinary power and extremely low cost:

“Get inside!”

A mother would appear at the window and settle in two seconds something for which we might now create a group chat, a notification, and some parental-control app.

Of course, children still play in the street in many places, and it would be absurd to turn one personal experience into a universal theory about neighborhoods, social classes, or generations. But the contrast caught my attention. In many of the middle- and upper-class urban settings I had known, that scene had become much less common. The street had lost some of its role as an extension of the home. Childhood was beginning to migrate into controlled spaces, screens, gated developments, schedules, and organized activities.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about fireflies yet.

But I was already noticing the same thing.

Contexts change. And when they do, they don’t just take objects and habits with them. They take entire ways of relating to one another.

The pace of a mountain

The most obvious difference isn’t in what I own.

It’s in the pace.

In a small rural community with few neighbors, relationships move at a different speed. Someone drops by and brings something. Another time, we take something to someone else. Sometimes a conversation happens in the middle of the day without needing a Google Calendar invitation titled “Informal Neighbor Alignment.”

Everyone works.

But work doesn’t occupy quite the same symbolic place.

For a long time, my life revolved around operations that had to keep running. Employees depended on the company. Customers had expectations. Boats needed maintenance. Equipment had to be ready. Government agencies had rules. Suppliers had payment deadlines. The bank, ever attentive to our spiritual development, had due dates.

Here, sometimes I stop because a jacu has wandered past.

It’s a large bird common in parts of the Atlantic Forest. Some have a reddish patch on the throat. When they take off nearby, their wings make such a racket that your first thought is that the Air Force has decided to fly a helicopter between the trees.

Flocks of parakeets pass through, too. A wild rabbit has turned up. There are marmosets. There are birds I can’t identify yet. There are sounds we hear before we discover who’s making them.

And there’s the sky.

The sky over a big city and the sky over a mountain are technically the same sky, which shows how much difference the phrase “technically the same thing” can conceal.

At night, we see far more stars. Sometimes a meteor passes. At other times, a bright object may be a satellite or space debris reflecting light or reentering the atmosphere. And toward evening, simply looking up has become a habit.

That’s how a star went out.

What star is that?

I had just finished working on an article about artificial intelligence and existential risk. A particularly lighthearted subject: the possibility of all of us dying.

After writing about humanity’s possible extinction, I sat down beside my wife.

We were looking at the sky when she asked:

“What star is that?”

I looked.

I saw the point of light.

And then the star went out.

For a few seconds, there was that little mental short circuit that happens when reality refuses to obey the category we’ve just assigned it.

Stars don’t generally go out because Marcelly asks about them.

I looked more closely.

The star came back.

And went out again.

It wasn’t a star.

It was a firefly.

We started laughing.

Then another appeared. Maybe one more.

And something strange happened: I was genuinely impressed to see a firefly.

A firefly.

When I was a child, this would not have been news. I remember places where there were lots of them, sometimes so many that memory rearranges them into little clouds of light blinking in the dark.

Then I realized something I hadn’t noticed until that moment.

I hadn’t seen fireflies in decades.

Are fireflies disappearing?

The scientific answer is more interesting than the headline.

It isn’t accurate simply to say “fireflies are going extinct,” as though firefly were a single species heading for the exit together. There are more than two thousand known species in the family Lampyridae worldwide, and enormous gaps remain in our knowledge of many of them.

But there are real reasons for concern.

Declines have been reported in different regions, some populations have disappeared locally, and certain species have already been assessed as threatened. Researchers and conservation organizations identify habitat loss and degradation, light pollution, pesticides, changes in water quality, and climate change among the major risks.

Light pollution carries a particularly cruel irony: an animal that spent millions of years perfecting the ability to produce light to communicate may now struggle because we light up the entire night.

We invented the streetlight and disrupted the fireflies’ love life.

A distinctly human contribution to biodiversity.

At the same time, science still lacks enough long-term data to say that all firefly populations are declining in the same way.

The firefly was only the beginning

That was when I realized the firefly wasn’t really the subject.

It was the trigger.

The little light blinking outside the tent had opened up a comparison between two moments in my own life. But widening the view just a little was enough to see that we make this kind of comparison all the time.

The species we encounter change. Cities change. Technologies change. So do the ways we work, shop, date, talk, raise children, learn, travel, produce things, play, and waste time—an activity at which humanity, despite all its innovations, remains remarkably consistent.

One generation remembers children filling the streets. Another remembers television bringing the family together at a set time. Another will remember online games, instant messages, and friendships that never required two people to be physically in the same place.

Someone who lived within one of those arrangements may look at the next and conclude that something essential has been lost.

And something probably has.

What we sometimes forget is that something has also been created.

A child who now builds part of their social life through a screen doesn’t miss a world where you had to wait for the landline to be free. For that child, the world wasn’t lost. It simply never existed as an experience.

A grandfather might say:

“It was different in my day.”

And he’d be absolutely right.

His grandchild might think, with equal conviction:

“Thank goodness.”

Neither is observing change from neutral ground. Each carries a biography, and that biography turns certain contexts into points of reference.

That’s why historical change and the human experience of change are not the same thing.

Technologically, a shift may expand possibilities and eliminate habits. Culturally, it may bring groups together and dissolve others. Socially, it may create freedoms an earlier generation didn’t have and forms of isolation it didn’t know. Economically, it may destroy professions and create new ones. Environmentally, it may alter landscapes and relationships between species. Along each dimension, gains and losses can coexist without asking our permission to fit into a simple story.

The trouble starts when we treat the arrangement we’re used to as the natural measure of how the world should be.

Perhaps that’s why growing older also involves a kind of displacement.

It isn’t just the body that finds some changes harder to keep up with. The setting that helped shape our frame of reference begins to disappear, little by little. Words change. Technologies change. Social codes change. Places change. People disappear. Objects that seemed permanent become museum pieces at a mildly offensive speed.

A child arrives in the world without having to unlearn the previous one.

We adults often have to.

And each generation repeats, with small variations, the same experience. It forms attachments within a particular context, comes to regard it as familiar, grows older, watches a different arrangement arrive, and discovers that the world kept changing without bothering to preserve the scenery of its youth.

The next generation will do exactly the same.

Perhaps with holograms, artificial intelligences, or whatever other technology their grandchildren will consider outdated and emotionally significant.

So the firefly didn’t just make me think about the possible loss of a species.

It made me notice how the feeling of loss is built.

To feel that a world has disappeared, we first have to have lived in it.

Some species are more vulnerable; others, less so. Some regions are well studied, while others remain almost unknown.

So my surprise that night is not a population survey.

“Jumas saw three fireflies in Nova Friburgo” is unlikely to survive peer review as definitive evidence of a global trend.

But the encounter did something statistics don’t always manage.

It triggered a memory.

And the memory triggered a sense of absence.

To miss something, you first have to have known it

I wasn’t devastated.

I didn’t spend the night hugging a tree and declaring that the world had lost all meaning.

It was just a slight uneasiness.

Something like stumbling across a song from childhood and realizing that a whole part of your life had been stored inside it without your knowing.

Why did that insect affect me that way?

Because I had something to compare it with.

I knew a world with more fireflies—at least in the places and moments that were part of my childhood. I saw plenty. Then I went decades without seeing them. When one reappeared, blinking in front of me, the distance between those two worlds became visible.

A child born into a future where a particular species no longer exists won’t miss it.

They may study its biology. They may see pictures. They may recognize the loss intellectually. They may find it outrageous that earlier generations allowed it to disappear.

But they won’t feel quite the same absence.

Longing requires memory.

And memory requires some form of prior presence.

It’s unlikely that anyone will wake up on a Tuesday overcome by an unbearable longing for a Triceratops.

We can like dinosaurs. We can study dinosaurs. We can watch Spielberg and develop a fairly convincing relationship with the idea of dinosaurs.

But none of us remembers a Triceratops crossing Grandma’s backyard.

There was no loss from our own lived experience.

That’s why we so often confuse two different things: a change in reality and our emotional experience of that change.

The change happens outside us.

The meaning of that change also happens within us.

That doesn’t make extinction irrelevant

Here we need to avoid a rather tempting leap in logic.

Saying that extinctions have always happened doesn’t mean it makes no difference if we cause them.

Earth has changed continuously over billions of years. Climates have changed. Continents have moved. Oceans have opened and closed. Ecosystems have emerged. Species have dominated entire environments and then disappeared. The overwhelming majority of species that have ever existed are no longer here.

That is natural history.

But we, too, are now a force capable of altering habitats at extraordinary speed. When we destroy environments, spread toxic substances, light up entire nights, or alter systems that other species depend on, we don’t magically become neutral spectators just because extinction predates us.

A volcano can destroy a forest, too.

That isn’t an argument for setting it on fire.

The interesting question lies elsewhere.

Even when we do everything we can to preserve something, what we preserve keeps changing.

Preserving doesn’t mean freezing in place.

Caring doesn’t mean preventing every change.

And perhaps part of our difficulty lies precisely in wanting what we love to keep resembling the version we learned to love.

We arrived very late to the party

There’s a useful way to grasp the scale of this history.

Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for around 300,000 years.

If we compressed the planet’s entire history into just 24 hours, Homo sapiens would appear in roughly the last six seconds before midnight.

If we prefer soccer, things get even more humbling.

In a 90-minute game representing Earth’s entire history, our species would take the field in the last four-tenths of a second.

That wouldn’t be “in the last minute of the second half.”

It would be practically after the commentator had already started saying, “It’s over.”

And yet we arrived a few tenths of a second ago and immediately began discussing how the planet ought to remain.

It’s an admirable level of confidence.

For almost all of Earth’s history, there were no human beings around to miss anything.

There were entire worlds without us.

Forests without human observers.

Extinctions without documentaries.

Oceans without resorts.

Extraordinary animals came into existence, dominated their environments, and disappeared without receiving a single tribute on Instagram.

Reality carried on.

Perhaps the problem is our expectation of permanence

We know that things change.

The problem is that we generally prefer changes to things we haven’t become attached to yet.

We want innovation, as long as it doesn’t alter what we consider essential. We want development, as long as the landscape of our childhood stays there waiting for us. We want long lives, but find it strange when the world we knew grows old along with us.

There’s an understandable contradiction in that.

Our consciousness builds continuity. We need it. If we woke up every morning with no connection to who we were yesterday, it would be hard enough to locate a toothbrush, let alone construct an identity.

So we create points of reference.

My city.

My profession.

My company.

My home.

The people I know.

The places I go.

The fireflies that were around when I was a child.

These things help shape my picture of the world and of myself within it.

When one of them disappears, more than the scenery changes.

A small part of that picture has to be rebuilt, too.

Perhaps that’s why seemingly trivial changes provoke such disproportionate reactions. Sometimes we aren’t defending an object, a custom, a profession, or a landscape.

We’re defending the stability of the story we tell ourselves.

I didn’t stay in one place for very long either

It would be intellectually convenient to end this article by saying that the world changes while I, a serene and perfectly consistent observer, watch it all from a privileged position.

Unfortunately, my own biography spoils that possibility.

I’ve been changing all along, too.

I once practiced martial arts seriously. I earned a brown belt in full-contact martial arts, competed in tournaments, and was on my way to a black belt.

After spending some time getting beaten up—an activity that, although highly educational, began producing less-than-elegant changes to my nose—I changed direction.

I took up painting.

I moved into the visual arts, painted in oils, took part in exhibitions, and sold paintings.

At some point, I apparently concluded that paint wasn’t abstract enough and went to work with computers.

I became a programmer and systems analyst.

Then I studied accounting.

I also worked in photography, including fashion photography.

Then I became a diving business owner and spent sixteen years among management, customers, boats, equipment, and stretches when I went back underwater.

Now I’ve started writing.

I don’t consider myself a philosopher. I’m not a specialist in any particular scientific discipline. And I’m still discovering what it means, for me, to make writing my main activity.

If someone had asked me, at any of those points, which one was the real Jumas, I probably would have pointed to whichever version was occupying the body that day.

Today, that strikes me as a strange question.

They all were.

And none of them stayed.

Perhaps identity is less a photograph than a sequence.

The problem is that we really like photographs.

The failure that changed its meaning

This also changes how I look at closing the company.

If I freeze the story in April, I can describe it as failure.

A company that had stood out, grown, opened operations, weathered crises, and finally lost enough of its economic footing that I decided to dismantle it.

The end.

Roll credits.

The theater lights come on.

But reality has the inconvenient habit of continuing past the point where we decide to end the story.

A company asset became a plot of land.

The land became the possibility of a house.

The lack of a house became a tent.

The tent became daily contact with a mountain.

The mountain became fruit trees, a vegetable garden, plans for a chicken coop, the idea of a fish pond, neighbors, guans, parakeets, and a sky I had stopped looking at.

And the sky became a firefly.

The firefly became this article.

So where, exactly, does failure end and something else begin?

I’m not trying to turn financial hardship into a motivational talk.

There are bills. There are losses. There are obligations still being settled. Living in a tent has pleasant moments and others when nature demonstrates that it never signed a contract with the comfort department. Rain still gets you wet. Cold is still cold. Mud doesn’t become philosophy just because we’re feeling contemplative.

A simple life isn’t a magically simple life.

It just shifts the complexities.

But it shifts priorities, too.

And perhaps that’s what I was looking for when I decided not to rebuild the company one more time.

What does what we call success cost?

For a long time, growth seemed like the obvious direction.

More customers.

More revenue.

More locations.

More employees.

More capacity.

The language of business treats “more” with an almost religious reverence.

A company that brought in ten wants to bring in twenty. Once it brings in twenty, the meeting begins on how to reach forty. Nobody walks into the room and says:

“Gentlemen, we’ve reached a rather pleasant size. Let’s stay here and leave early to watch birds.”

They’d probably be referred to HR.

But there’s a question that growth figures can’t answer on their own:

how much of your life do you have to hand over to sustain the structure that produces what we call success?

There’s no universal answer.

For one person, building an enormous company may be an extraordinarily meaningful experience. For another, tending six chickens and writing may make for a life more in keeping with what they want.

Perhaps the mistake is turning one arrangement into a universal yardstick for all the others.

There’s no automatic virtue in living in a tent.

Just as there’s no automatic virtue in having four branches.

The question is the relationship between what we build and what we sacrifice to maintain it.

Time is an asset, too.

So is health.

So is attention.

So is freedom.

And they all share one particularly unpleasant economic characteristic: they’re finite.

The world isn’t trying to preserve our memories

That night’s firefly brought all of this together in an almost ridiculous way.

I had spent the day thinking about artificial intelligence, technology, future risks, and potentially enormous transformations of civilization.

Then an insect a few centimeters long blinked on and off in front of us and took me fifty years back.

Perhaps that’s one of the difficulties of thinking about change.

It happens at different scales at the same time.

A company closes.

A profession changes.

A city grows.

A forest retreats or recovers.

An insect population declines.

A technology reorganizes markets.

One species appears.

Another disappears.

Continents move a few centimeters.

Stars are born and die.

We arrange all of this into categories because we need to understand something.

But reality doesn’t seem particularly concerned with our categories.

It keeps happening.

Change isn’t good

It isn’t bad, either.

That statement requires care.

Changes can have consequences we consider terrible. An extinct species represents an irreversible loss of biological diversity. A destroyed forest can jeopardize entire systems. An illness can brutally transform a family. A war can destroy millions of lives.

It would make no sense to look at any of those things and reply with a contemplative smile:

“Everything changes.”

That would merely be a sophisticated way of not thinking.

The point is something else.

“Good” and “bad” are judgments we make about transformations from particular perspectives, values, needs, and consequences.

Change itself comes before the judgment.

It happens.

Then we try to understand what happened, preserve what we value, prevent what we consider destructive, and bring about conditions we judge to be better.

And we should do that.

It may simply help to remember that no victory turns reality into a motionless object.

Even what we manage to preserve will keep changing.

Including us.

The firefly doesn’t know what nostalgia is

I imagine that firefly going about its night with no knowledge of the philosophical importance I had just assigned to it.

It was probably busy with more urgent matters in the life of a lampyrid beetle.

Finding food.

Avoiding becoming food.

Reproducing.

Blinking at the right moment.

Not crashing into the tent of the philosopher who isn’t a philosopher.

For it, that light wasn’t a symbol of childhood, biodiversity, the passage of time, or impermanence.

It was simply part of its existence.

The extra meaning was mine.

And that may be the most interesting part.

We don’t just perceive changes.

We load them with meaning.

A house isn’t just a building when it was your childhood home.

A song isn’t just a sequence of sounds when it played during an important period of your life.

A profession isn’t just an activity when it organized sixteen years of someone’s identity.

A firefly isn’t just a glowing beetle when its light connects a night on a mountain to a child’s eyes decades earlier.

The world changes.

And we feel that change according to what the world has already meant to us.

Perhaps starting over is simply noticing this

When I traded that company asset for the land, I was mainly thinking about solving a practical problem.

I needed to reorganize my life.

Reduce expenses.

Settle obligations.

Create a base from which to start again.

There was no philosophical plan called “The Mountain Existential Project.”

Just as well.

It probably would have involved PowerPoint.

But little by little, the material change began producing other changes.

I started paying attention to the soil because I wanted to plant.

I started paying attention to the sun because I needed to know where to put the vegetable garden.

I started paying attention to the water because I needed to understand drainage and supply.

I started paying attention to the birds because they were there.

I started looking at the sky because I could finally see it better.

And on one of those nights, I saw a star that wasn’t a star.

Perhaps a change of life is, in part, a change in what we pay attention to.

For years, my attention was captured by revenue, operations, scale, staff, schedules, customers, boats, maintenance, inspections, taxes, and due dates.

Now some of it is occupied with trying to figure out why one seedling is growing more slowly than another.

I don’t know whether that represents progress.

Perhaps it’s just gardening.

But it’s a different arrangement of existence.

And right now, it’s the one I want to try.

The only thing that doesn’t change

There’s a phrase that has been repeated in different forms for thousands of years: everything changes.

It’s so familiar that it risks sounding banal.

Perhaps it’s banal precisely because it’s hard to find a more enduring observation.

My company changed.

My profession changed.

The cities I’ve lived in changed.

My body changed.

My nose can certainly testify to part of the process.

My relationship with work changed.

The land changes with every rain.

The trees I planted are changing as I write.

The animals that show up there form populations that change, too.

The Atlantic Forest in front of me isn’t the same forest it was a hundred years ago, and it won’t be the same a hundred years from now.

Fireflies change.

We change.

Even what we try to conserve can only be conserved within some process of transformation.

Perhaps the most precise formulation isn’t that change is the only thing that doesn’t change.

That sounds like a paradox too pretty not to be suspicious of.

Perhaps it’s that transformation is a permanent property of whatever exists in time.

And our difficulty isn’t that we don’t know this.

We know.

The difficulty is feeling it when transformation reaches something that was part of us.

A company.

A home.

A city.

A person.

A landscape.

Or a small light blinking in the dark.

That night, my wife asked what star that was.

I looked.

The star went out.

For a few seconds, that seemed strange.

Then we discovered it was a firefly and started laughing.

Perhaps that’s a good image to end on.

Sometimes something goes dark, and our first impression is that we’ve lost what we were looking at.

Then our eyes adjust.

And we realize it wasn’t quite what we thought.

Reality had simply changed form.

Or perhaps we had finally taken a better look.