Sometimes I forget to look around.
Sometimes I get so caught up in myself that I forget that the world exists, and that it's vast. My gaze is "incurvatus se:" I am inward-focused, too inward-focused. I am blind to everyone and everything but myself, my own feelings, my own mental world. It's as if I walk through my days with blinders on, like the ones they put on horses, so that I am completely cut off from everything but me. Those horses pull carriages, and they wear those blinders so that they don't get distracted from their job, which is to walk along a given path, and nowhere else. Maybe I am one of those horses; maybe the duty I've forced upon myself is to stay inside my own head, in a curved-in universe of my own making. Maybe I, like the horse, wear the blinders so that I can stay perfectly focused on the thing I've deemed most important- my own life. But what if the blinders came off? What would happen to the horse? What would happen to me?
Today, the blinders fell off my chance. I was driving; I had just pulled onto a highway I've driven on a million times, and today I looked all the way down it, from the top of this hill to where it rises up another hill, all the way on the other side of town, and then disappears. Today, it disappeared into fog- a thin, gray mist cascading off the mountain and draping itself over the city like a length of tulle. As I drove down this hill, I could see the lights of tiny cars going up and down the other one, coming south into downtown or going north to pass through the trees and into heavier fog. And in that moment, I was not incurvatus se. I was looking outward, and not just looking, but really seeing. Here was just one of the myriad exquisite trivialities the universe has to offer: this length of winding road that stretches for miles and miles through the November mist, this vantage point from which you can trace it through a sleepy town to the next horizon.
So to answer the question, when the blinders come off, we see what we've been missing. We see the wonders that our own minds can't even begin to create. We realize that there is more to see than straight ahead into the worries and possible problems of a future we can't know anyway. There is all around: three hundred and sixty degrees of world, waiting to be reveled in.
