1,000 miles from land, the sea is covered in a dome of stars.

If you will most likely never experience such a thing, do you want to hear about it?

For me? Absolutely. For everyone, I’m not so sure.

Friends are visiting from the Philippines and they sailed their boat from New Zealand to Pulau, Thailand. It was 3,800 miles. In a sailboat. Just a few of them. He described the sky in the middle of the night.

Under a sliver of a moonlight, the sky isn’t just full of stars, it’s a dome covering everything you can see. It’s a ceiling on the world and there is every star that you’ve ever seen above you and you sail your ship through the darkness and silence as the only one awake in the world.

I’m a little concerned when I paddle my boogie board past the breakers. For me, that’s the open sea. I went out on a kayak the other day and although I could still see and hear the thousands of beach goers on the white sands, the other direction was nothing but open, endless, wild water.

1,000 miles from land is hard to fathom unless I’m on a Carnival Cruise and playing shuffleboard with laughing elderly couples.* But they did it. Will I ever do it? I don’t know. Not next week. Do I want to hear their stories? Am I curious about how they did it, what they do on a daily basis, what wildlife they saw, what happens when storms hit? Yes. I want to hear about it, I want to see movies about it and I want to read book about it.

Do I need to live every life I read about, see in the movies or hear at cocktail parties? No, although sometimes I think about it. But I need to not dwell on them, not regret that those are not the lives I’m living and focus on my own and make that the life I want to live.

But still. A dome of stars that spans the entire ceiling of the universe when I sit alone at the wheel of a silent sailing ship a fleck of white in the middle of a vast, dark ocean of nothingness?

I smile at the dream, at the possibility, but I do not dwell on the probability.

* Even that I’ve never done.