005 Half in the Light
Hey Moon, half of you is in sunlight tonight, as on almost every night. Only our view of you changes.
Do we judge anyone by how much of them we happen to see?
How much of a person do you actually see before you decide who they are?
Tonight the moon is a thin silver curve. Next week it will be half. In two weeks, a full bright circle.
It looks as if the moon is growing and shrinking. It is not.
What really happens
Half of the moon is always lit by the sun, on almost every night of the month. The only exception is a lunar eclipse, when the Earth's shadow falls across it.
What changes is where we stand. As the moon travels around the Earth, we see more or less of its sunlit half. The moon stays whole. Only our view of it changes.
How we know: This is basic astronomy, the same reason the moon's phases repeat about every month.
The turn
We meet people the way we see the moon: one thin slice at a time. A bad day at work. One angry message. One quiet week.
It is easy to decide we know the whole person from the sliver we happened to see.
Three takeaways
- What you see of someone is not all of them.
- People do not change as often as our view of them does.
- Before you judge, ask what part of the picture is hidden from where you stand.
The moon was full all along. We were only looking at a slice.
Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.