I have recently read The Human Anthropocene by John Green, and have found myself thinking about just how funny the five star rating system is, as it was never intended to be used in the way it is used now. However, I personally have used it too much for it to be separate from my life now, so I will personally rate the rays of the sun. 

I, like John Green, am an anxious person; I typically get anxiety about leaving before I even leave. My thoughts run from me as though they are real, and happening. My therapist and I often joke that the speed of my thoughts could reach the moon faster than any rocketship. This usually leads to me feeling like the moment between winding up a toy and releasing it. 

In the height of the summer, I live in my second home, 120 miles away from my home. As a result, I often miss my partner and family. But when I am able to come home, I am usually overly anxious about things that could happen in the future; that I will miss them terribly when I am away. I start to pull away from those who I don’t see often enough, from the little time I do have with them. 

When I come home, I see my partner as much as I can, and as tragic as it may sound, the sun usually likes to go on vacation when we are able to spend time together. However, on this one particular day, I was miserable that the sun had gone away. My anxiety was at a high that I had only an hour left with him until I had to leave, then 30 minutes, and that the distance would make our relationship harder, and that I had to go to work in the morning; my mind was running too quickly for my own comfort. 

In the midst of my mental marathon, my partner had leaned down and whispered that I should look up at the clouds. The warm sun was bleeding through the gaps of the cool gray clouds, leaving streaks of gold light in the air. I sit and think, my thoughts pausing. In literature, the sun is often referred to as something that will save someone, or heaven, depending on how religious they are. Bugs rely on the sun to point the right way up, people once relied on the sun to inform them of what time of day it was. The sun has always innately been used as a way to help point the way to everyone and everything, as life as we know it depends on the sun. It probably couldn’t care less. 

Humans are dependent on the sun. As powerful as we may be, humans are also incredibly powerless. We let our emotions get the best of us constantly, we have trouble knowing when it is enough, we hunger for things that cannot be ours. Humans like to think that we have it all figured out, when we are usually our own doom. We like to pretend that we have control in an ever changing world to try to hang on to our own thoughts that we can change the world. 

The sun reminds us that there is so much that we cannot control. Often, we cannot control the things that give us anxiety, or the reason why, but that’s okay. There will never be enough answers for the human race, and the sun reminds us of that. It also reminds us to look up for better things, as they may come within the darkest moments, and that we must constrain our worries as best as we can. 

I rate the rays of the sun, 4.5 stars out of 5. 

07/02/2025