Corner of My Eye

Yesterday I realized something about my world that I had always found it hard to focus on.

In the corner of my eye, there is a figure. It is an abstract; it has no coherent face. It has no discernible voice.

It has no singular shape. It's actually more of a plurality that an individual being. Because no matter where I go and what I see, he/she has never found his/herself out of my sight.

Maybe I never noticed this because I tend to take things for granted when they're out of focus. This background, this atmosphere, this very room can be easily seen as a temporary dwelling on my way to somewhere else. A new or familiar backdrop for every scene, perhaps. But the thing is, just because it's always moving and shifting and changing, that doesn't necessarily mean that it hasn't been the same background the whole time. Because I'm starting to open myself up to the idea that this is not simply the space I occupy for a while, but actually the palette with which I paint my life. These colors, these sounds; they are what defines me despite their kaleidoscopic inconsistancy. When I look into my own memories, there is a place for every color and sound and smell and breath of air and drop of rain and person I come across, and I am just a collective of all of it.

And so when I see in this way, the blurry sides of the world I see suddenly become just as important as the clearly defined road ahead. Because these present indescribable uncertainties are now certainly my inevitable future. Because when I tell these stories to myself or to others, it's not the story itself that brings memory back to reality. It's the unpolished edges that I experience, should I choose to relay them, that prove to the world I have lived a life.

And in this light, there is a new figure; an old figure. It is not something I fear in any way, because I think I have some recognition of who they are. If I was to turn my eye, if I was to see them up close and in the light of focus, they would appear as someone I know, having a conversation with someone else, texting, maybe just off in another room. But despite this appearance, I know that is not the sort of thing the abstract figure does with them in the same time, in the same silhouette. What it does when I can barely make out their shape, let alone their voice. Somehow, in the quiet places bordering my vision, I simply know that they are comforting, healing, rebuilding, bringing hope to the hopeless, finding the love inside to reach out and impact the lives around them. I can see this because I can see the results of this love, and I'm familiar with it's source and the people who have chosen to take it on as their veil.

Experiencing this in action is the ultimate form of peace for me. That there is something, whether I can see it or not, fundamentally going on all around me for the good of the world. And that maybe in the end, I will have been a part of it.