There are moments in life that are so wonderfully ordinary that you almost miss how extraordinary they are.

I saw the Perseids last night for the first time in my life, not from some spectacular mountain in the middle of nowhere, not on a romantic beach, not wrapped in some perfectly planned experience that belongs on a travel brochure. I saw them from the garden, on an inflatable mattress, with a glass of wine, a cat wandering around as if he had personally arranged the whole evening and that feeling of being exactly where you are supposed to be, without needing to say why.

There was something ridiculously simple about it and I loved every second, including the one I fell asleep exactly there.My plan was the window of an attic, but a mattress was suddenly set outside, right in the middle of the garden, under the deep darkness of the night. I lay down, looked up at the endless sky above me. For a moment, it felt as though the whole world had disappeared and there was nothing left to do but breathe, watch and wonder.

And then… there they were.

The Perseids are not actually stars falling from the sky, although that is exactly what they look like. They are tiny pieces of dust and rock left behind by a comet called 109P/Swift-Tuttle, a huge icy body that takes roughly 133 years to travel around the Sun. Every August, Earth passes through the trail it has left behind, and some of those tiny pieces, sometimes no bigger than a grain of sand, collide with our atmosphere and burn up in flashes of light. Which somehow makes the whole thing even more beautiful to me. Something that travelled through space for centuries can meet the Earth for a fraction of a second and become a streak of light that someone, somewhere, happens to see. Insane, right?

The Perseids appear to come from the direction of the constellation Perseus, which is why they have their name. They are one of the most famous and spectacular meteor showers of the year, known for being particularly fast, bright and sometimes leaving those beautiful lingering trails behind them. Under perfect dark-sky conditions, there can be dozens of meteors in an hour, sometimes close to a hundred. And this year was especially kind to anyone looking up, because the Perseids arrived around a new moon, leaving the sky beautifully dark enough for the faintest ones to have a chance of being seen.

But I didn’t know any of that while I was lying there.

I had already missed the first two and I could feel that tiny wave of disappointment creeping in, wondering if I had somehow missed my chance. Then suddenly, a bright, long streak of light tore across the sky, so clear and beautiful that there was no mistaking it, a shooting star, right above us.

Everything stopped. No plans, no schedules, no tomorrow, no yesterday, no things to fix, understand, solve or control. No overwhelming feelings. Just the sky and underneath it, me, one tiny human being existing somewhere in this infinite universe, feeling completely present and, for once, completely at peace, completely, quietly happy.

There is a particular kind of intimacy in being still with someone. You don’t have to entertain each other. You don’t have to fill every silence. You don’t have to prove anything. You can simply exist. And somehow, that feels like a lot.

I have spent much of my life looking for extraordinary moments, perhaps because life has taught me, sometimes rather brutally, that things can change in an instant. People think that happiness has to be big enough to notice, but lying there, on an inflatable mattress, made me think that happiness is not always the spectacular thing, but more the quiet thing: the glass of wine getting warmer because you are too comfortable to drink it, the cat deciding that your snack is now his snack, the conversation you have while staring at the stars, the presence beside you which doesn’t make your nervous system work harder, but finally lets it exhale.

I looked at the sky and thought about how many people must have been looking at those same stars throughout history. People falling in love. People losing love. People beginning again. People grieving. People celebrating. People lying next to someone they loved, wondering what their lives would become. Humans under a ridiculously enormous universe, watching tiny pieces of it burn across the sky. It made my life feel both incredibly small and incredibly precious.

There is something comforting in knowing that the universe does not hurry. The comet leaves its dust behind, Earth keeps moving through it, the stars keep appearing, the seasons return, things happen when they happen. We are not always meant to chase the extraordinary.

Perhaps that is what I loved most about this night, not the shooting stars, not the wine, not even the beautiful summer darkness, but the feeling of being exactly where I wanted to be.  After everything life has been, after all the noise, all the rebuilding, all the learning to stand again, there is something almost surreal about discovering that peace can look like this. A garden. A cat. A glass of wine. A mattress. A sky full of shooting stars. And a presence besides you that makes the world feel a little softer.  Perhaps that is how you know something has changed inside you. When you stop asking life for proof that you are finally fine and simply notice that you are.

Maybe I will remember the Perseids for the rest of my life, but I have a feeling that what I will really remember is the feeling underneath them. That quiet little thought: Oh, so this is what peace feels like again. And for once, I didn’t wish for anything else.

I just lay there and watched the stars fall, and somewhere between one streak of light and the next, I realized that I had finally made peace with the life I have, the life I lost and the life that is still waiting to be lived. For once, I wasn’t looking backwards or wondering what might have been. I was simply there. And I was happy to be there.