Maybe it just bloomed, so I'm only now noticing it, but I've lived in this apartment for four years. That's four Mays that went by without me ever once noticing this bush. And I'm even more certain that it wasn't just put in there; that kind of thing just doesn't happen. So that means that I've been completely oblivious of this very beautiful plant for all this time! Does that mean something, does it say something about me?
The concept of perception has been on my mind lately, not least because it seems that the way I perceive the world visually really is changing, and not for the worst. In the past few weeks, I've noticed that my vision has become increasingly sensitive to motion -- it's as if I'm watching things with a high-speed camera, able to pick out the slightest details of movement. The actual fidelity of my vision hasn't improved any, and I still have terrible eyesight without my glasses or contacts, but I'm taking in more frames. Or it feels that way, at any rate; it probably isn't physiologically possible, but I'm definitely perceiving an enhancement to my perception.
Maybe I'm just paying better attention to the world than I was before. But seeing the details in things is a mixed blessing; it's beautiful, but also incredibly distracting, and I find my attention arrested by the slightest motion. And when I'm so focused on one thing that's moving, I completely ignore everything else. Razor focus is fun, but it might be part of the reason that I can be shocked by the sudden appearance of a permanent bush.
I do tend to get lost in thought, to let the world slip past me while I'm engrossed in just one avenue of inquiry (which I've discussed here before). But now I'm starting to get concerned about my susceptibility to "missing the forest for the trees," because I don't want to miss anything. If you want to experience everything the world has to offer, should you approach it narrowly, or broadly? Experiencing everything in depth is impossible with one lifetime, but is experiencing a few things in depth better or worse than experiencing many things shallowly? And did you really think I was going to get through a post without mentioning trees somewhere?
I'm not really overly concerned by any of this, though. Life goes on, and if I'm doomed to intermittent tunnel vision, I can still be content knowing that my time, no matter how I spend it, will be well spent. That's because I'm developing such a keen eye for metaphor that everything is infinitely applicable to everything else. I've always been adept at twisting the meanings of things to any shape that I wished, but now I'm getting a sense for how I can use that power as more than a party trick. To see, and to shape, are precious gifts, and I'm so happy to find that they can be used all the time.
Let me close with an excerpt from a book by Charles Warren Stoddard, In the Footprints of the Padres, from the chapter titled IN YOSEMITE SHADOWS:
I leave this morning. Opportunity takes me by the hand and leads me away. The heart leaps with emotion: everything is momentous in a quiet life. This is the portal we entered one deepening dusk. Its threshold will soon be cushioned with snow; let us hasten on. If I were asked when is the time to visit Yosemite, I should reply: Go in the spring; see the freshets and the waterfalls in their glory, and the valley in its fresh and vivid greenness. Go again, by all means, in the autumn, when the woods are powdered with gold dust and a dreamy haze sleeps in the long ravines; when the stars sparkle like crystals and the mornings are frosty; when the clouds visit us in person, and the trees look like crayon sketches on a vapory background, and the cliffs like leaning towers traced in sepia on a soft ground glass. Go in spring and autumn, if possible. I should choose autumn of the two; but go at any hazard, and do not rest till you have been.
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