A Pulsing Light
To gain clarity, I take off my glasses.
-4.0 vision, mind you. The world gets blurry, ambiguous, intangible… I can’t see s***.
It all started when I couldn’t sleep one night for the same reason most of us can never sleep: thinking about someone we love. I was tossing and turning over a situation of the past and the unclear future surrounding it.
I remembered hearing once that you should get out of bed when you can’t sleep. My friend’s mother used to bake cookies. If you distract your mind, she would say, you’ll eventually remember your obvious tiredness and the endless thoughts will give up for the night.
So I went out onto my balcony at 2 a.m.— my haven. I sat outside, in the dead quiet of the night, and took off my glasses. There was nothing to see out there, anyways– a few street lamps, the neighboring apartment building, some dead patches of grass and rocks. No need for 20/20 vision at this moment.
Almost immediately, a strange calm washed over me and I loved the blurriness. Looking back, I see there was something methodical about that move; I took away my vision and suddenly my blindness directly and clearly related (almost stupidly obvious) to the notion that I had no control over my future. No control over the situation I was thinking about, no means of seeing what tomorrow will bring until tonight packs up its bags and allows tomorrow’s sun to rise.
When you cannot see the things in front of you, you listen to your thoughts more. The street lamps glared into big balls of light, pulsing as my retinas adjusted, speaking to me in a language that only the blinding could see. I looked down at my hands, bringing my ornament rings towards the tip of my nose; that close to my face was crystal clear. I could see the things right before my eyes and everything else was a total, beautiful, blur.
That’s how we must see life, isn’t it? As blindly as I saw it. Anything beyond an inch from our face is too fuzzy for us to notice— it’s composition too intricate to process. We have no clue what the words on a sign might read or what the street lamp is guiding us towards (or protecting us from). Life is beautifully foggy.
Knowing this, it dawned on me that I had absolutely no idea what was going to come of the situation I had been contemplating in bed. I had no way of knowing. How dare I let it steal my sleep from me?!
Even if I was pretty sure, based on logic, reasoning, and past experiences…. we all know that means nothing in this life. God must laugh at our folly and our reasoning. How could we possibly know?
Clarity is understanding you won’t receive an answer until it’s right in front of your face. In the present, the ‘now’. The things you actually have control over in this very moment. The things that are begging for your attention. The only things promised, as tomorrow most certainly isn’t.
Worriment now leads me to take off my means of vision, and realize that the adventure I’m on is a blind one: a pulsing light in the dead of the night, that my eyes will never adjust to.
