In one of the hardest moments of my life, standing guard during my army service, my body heavy with exhaustion but my spirit refusing to bow, I lifted my eyes to the sky.
I could have chosen to look at the ground, to bury my eyes at my feet, to surrender to everything around me.
But inside me was a voice stronger than any exhaustion, a voice telling me: "Lift your head. The sky is yours."
I remembered Stephen Hawking's words: "Look up at the stars and not down at your feet." It was as if fate were testing me in that moment, daring me to actually lift my eyes.
So I lifted them, and suddenly, the miracle happened.
Before my eyes, across the dark sky, the International Space Station passed by.
The greatest thing humans have ever built, circling the Earth as if bearing witness to human genius, to what people can do when they insist on challenging the impossible.
My breath froze.
My tears almost fell, not from exhaustion, but from that heavenly sign that had landed in my eyes.
It was bigger than coincidence.
It was a clear message, a sign written in light: that scientific ambition, self-development, and the pursuit of knowledge are the greatest things a person can offer himself and the world.
In that moment, I felt the sky was speaking to me,
that the station crossing before my eyes wasn't just metal and solar panels circling the Earth, but the embodiment of a human dream, living proof that thought and science can lift a person to the heights of space.
And I, that small soldier standing on the ground, felt my eyes connecting me to them up there.
It was as if there were a pact between us: that one day I would be part of this path, that I would make something that lasts, that my gaze would never drop to the dust, but would stay fixed on the sky, where my dreams belong.
It wasn't just a passing moment. It was the greatest eye contact of my life.
I didn't look into a person's eyes; I looked into the eyes of all humanity, into its greatest achievement, into the dream that floats above us.
Since that day, I've known that my fate is to keep going, to walk the path of science, to leave my mark, however long it takes and however hard the road becomes.
Because that look, that moment, was a promise,
a promise between me and the sky.
Translated from the Arabic original. Read it in Arabic