If you had one wish, right now, what would it be? What if you had a method in front of you for sending that wish out into the world? Would you do it? I think someone ingenious designed sky lanterns. They seem so simple: piece of paper, wire hoop, wick. They may look idiot proof, but you have to really work for them. They are finicky and don’t want to light. In the process of lighting them, you have to have constant vigilance to avoid setting the whole thing ablaze. There are few sadder images than a paper lantern burning on the ground. There is no stopping it, no saving it. You just have to watch it become ashes at your feet. A wish wasted. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

After you’ve snuffed out three candles, dripped wax on your hands, and probably spent a good amount of time cursing under your breath, and you’ve managed to light the lantern while at the same time avoiding lighting the lantern, then that’s when you experience the truly brilliant mechanism of the sky lantern: you wait. For some reason I had this image in my mind, probably put there by someone at Disney Pixar, of lighting the lantern and then releasing it a second later to watch it soar away. Needless to say, that is not how it works in the real world. In the real world you have to keep holding on to that lantern. You make your wish and then you keep holding that wire hoop. It gets hotter and hotter and you want to let go and move your fingers before they get scorched, but you know if you do, that wish will crash and burn. So you wait. You wait for the fire to make the paper balloon out until you don’t have to prop it up anymore. You wait until you can feel it tugging at your fingers, until it pulls away of its own volition and takes flight.

Here’s where the genius of the lantern lies: all that waiting means you have a lot of time to think. Most wishes we make are much more time sensitive. At 11:11, you only have one minute to decide. You have about seven seconds to make a wish before people get antsy for birthday cake. A shooting star gives you even less time. With a paper lantern, your wheels can really turn. You suddenly get existential, when you’re not a very existential person. For some reason when you’re in the dark with that lantern in your hands and dozens of people around you doing the same, you don’t feel silly for investing a piece of yourself in that wish. It can really mean something. It can really be your way of speaking your desires for the future, if only in the quiet confines of your own mind. And then it is unbelievable satisfying to release that into the world. To admit what you want for this moment, for your life, and watch the embodiment of that admission float away into the night.

Somehow in the sky it seems like more than just a piece of paper and wire. Maybe it’s the time and effort you put into getting it there. Maybe it’s the piece of your heart you put into it with a wish. Or maybe it’s just hot air. I guess I’ll never know.