It was 6:05 a.m. on August 19th, a mere 57 degrees as the sun insinuated itself between the slats of the Venetian blinds in our bedroom on the second floor, where I was standing in the buff. I was about to dress to drive my husband to his carpool pickup point when I heard an explosive roar on Avon Road below.

Our cat Ratpacks, who had just settled his black fur on the sill of the open window, levitated himself, spread-eagle, and vanished. It was a sound like hundreds of gallons of water under pressure gushing from a water main

I raced to the vacated window and scanned the street, sure of an imminent flood. But there was nothing. No utility truck and definitely no water. As I quizzically widened my search, my peripheral vision caught something, forcing me to look up.

“O my God!” I exclaimed, struggling to keep my voice low in the dawn stillness. “Bob, Bob,” I rasped, “come here. Hurry, hurry!”

I ran half-way to the bathroom door and back to the window, like Lassie doing her signature dance of life-saving urgency: “What is it, girl? Is it Timmy? Is he in trouble?” Bob emerged, towel-wrapped, partially-shaven, still holding a soapy razor in his hand.

“Look, look,” I commanded, jumping up and down, all body parts leaping at different rates, pointing out the window.

“Where?”

“To the left. Look up.”

There, gliding south along Avon Road itself just even with the tops of the trees lining the street, was a hot air balloon with two people, almost close enough to touch, in the gondola. The vertical panels of red, blue, green, and yellow fabric glowed in the cool sunlight. Past houses 50, 47, 43, 39. Whoosh. Past 37, 35. Whoosh again. The balloon began to rise, a final whoosh, gaining height and clearing tree spires.

I craned my neck and pressed my face against the screen to follow its course. I wanted to throw open the screen and lean out, but propriety prevailed. In what seemed like an instant it was gone. Bob and I looked at one another, beaming, and shaking our heads in amazement.

“That was great!”

“I wish I’d had the camera handy.”

He hurried back to finish shaving while I reassured Ratpacks, now hunkered down in the closet, that the sky was not falling. His widely flattened ears told me he wasn’t buying anything I was selling so I finally dressed. As Bob and I drove towards his carpool, we cast our eyes about the crystalline sky, hoping for one last vestige…but there was nothing.

Aloud we wondered how many times the balloon had been by before our notice, drifting majestically over us, whooshless, undetected, and how many other buoyant spectacles we might have missed because we simply hadn’t looked up from our daily routine.

There are so many things happening around us all the time of which we are largely unaware. Our inattentiveness to them may be due to our feeling introspective, inadequate, or generally overwhelmed by all that is going on around us. When we narrow our focus on ourselves, we may literally and figuratively keep our eyes and minds glued to the ground. That is, we are often likely to miss the many gateways to opportunities which float by.

Opportunities are the favorable coming together of circumstances. But opportunities won’t exist for us unless we look up and are aware of our total environment, not just the path ahead of us. And they won’t exist for us unless we’re prepared to take advantage of them when they occur. Like the hot air balloon, they wait for no one.