Looking In

Maybe life has a different perspective when viewed through slightly blurry lenses.

I currently am sitting on my porch, wearing a jacket because I am freezing, and I have one contact in my left eye. I think I scratched my right eye taking out my lenses Monday night because my eye has hurt like crazy when I put my lens in since. Damn scratched cornea.


But anyway, life looks a little different when one looks at the world with one good eye and one pretty shitty nearsighted astigmatized eye. Obviously there is the distinct blurriness, but perhaps I could look at things in shades of gray instead of just plain, clear cut black and white.  Things could be easier, I suppose, if I allowed them to blur together in a cohesive tangle instead of hoping for a straight answer.


Perhaps not.  Perhaps the only thing I am getting out of this one contact thing is a strained right eye, but shit, it never hurts to wax philosophical.  My favorite philosopher, Soren Kirkegaard once said, "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."  How true he was.  The hardest thing in life might be to swallow the bubble of fear that forms in your stomach and blurs the distinction between the obvious and the delusion of uncertainty.  I have often suffered from that fear, that anxious tumble of butterflies and deluded reason that has the ability to freeze a perfectly rational person in their tracks.  I hate feeling as if someone poured ice into my veins, that sense of doubt one gets when fear steps in.


Oh, but the feeling you get when you pop that bubble and slap fear in the smug face!  It's such a heady, delicious feeling.  I imagine that perhaps the pursuit of freedom takes a bit of blurring, of smudging the charcoal lines on the stark white paper...Nothing in life is truly clear, perfectly sharp.  Nothing transcends the line of 20/20.  Perhaps one has to scratch their cornea to understand that.


I think that perhaps emotions work like that too.  Take for instance, matters of the heart.  I suppose we would all like love to be sharp and clear, charcoal and snow...but honestly, in all reality, it is a smeared compilation of anguished grays and delighted cream.  The heart kind of views things in a complicated Venn diagram, analyzing and overanalyzing things until they become a meaningless babble. 


I'm sure this unfocused clarity won't make sense the next time I read this post, but it makes perfect sense now:  We have to blur the edges of life in order to get the entire picture.  We can't always expect life to hand us a straightforward answer...we have to go searching through the mottled mess of our everyday lives to figure out the answers ourselves.