Foggy (Why “vision”?)

Hello, Frameshifters.

Our next #postaday is (was?) foggy. Day 3! Sadly, a day late (“Darn you, air travel!”), but here nonetheless.

I started, once again, with a ten minute free write:

*Waaaah*, ear drums reverberating, chest collapsing,
eyes moist with lack of sight,
blinded like a cold washcloth blanketing your face,
droplets collecting on your jaw line,
chattering, shivering,
newborn in the dark,
hands grasping the damp air,
tiny fingers, tiny compared to the long limbs that greet you,
twigs to branches, saplings to trunks to withering to dust to roots to sapling to vague notions of cycles too long to see, so distant as to go beyond the horizon,
eyes squinting at the parallax,
water bent at the edges of a tube,
blurring accurate measurement, closeness does not yield accuracy,
arcing lines as darts fly, gravity leaves you wanting wings, fight the weak force, take off above the clouds,
too near the sun is perilous, but it feels so good, refreshingly warm like the smell of fresh baked bread, cookies, ANYTHING,
clouds just cold wet blankets in the sky,
crystals so small and interwoven, yet so distant,
creating patterns so small and simultaneously so large,
perception becomes meaningless, interpretation foolish, “Can you see what it is?” Cow, monkey, dragon, angel…

After a pause, I ended up scrawling some more in my notebook mid-flight:

What is the value and purpose of sight? Protection, navigation, beauty? Why do we call it “vision,” the “big picture,” foresight? Clairvoyance… I thought of myself as clairvoyant for a time, so good was I at predicting events and patterns. If you’ve read the short story “The Nothing” from The Book of Frank Herbert or the first three books of the Dune Chronicles, you know how dangerous foresight is — where once there were branching paths, now there is just certainty. Can it really be considered foresight if you make it happen? And how then do we grapple with uncertainty? What do you do when your vision is not clear? Intuition? Blind faith? Paralysis? What role does ego play? Confidence? Mastery? Intelligence? Presumption?

A friend once said to me, “You’re not living. Turn off your eyes.” Well, I’m paraphrasing… But I did. It was weird not predicting, just living in the moment — well, to the extent I was capable. It is not until this very moment that I realized that, 16 years later, I’ve learned to balance present-ness/non-assumption and pattern recognition. Literally while writing this. Until this moment, I presumed I had never regained my “sight” — and perhaps I haven’t, really… but it’s something. Maybe it has been embracing my intuition, which is decidedly not linear — bubbles, bubbles everywhere in my vision, like zooming in on a sudsy bath to a fraction of an inch… So many possibilities. Now, how to choose the right one? The “right” one… Right? Ugh…

I’m still struggling with that last bit. “Paralysis by analysis,” they call it. I’m intellectually convinced that there is no right answer, but I still cling to this idea that “preferable = right,” even though limited vision would suggest that what is a preferable now may not lead to a preferable later… And so the arms race for vision returns… *sigh*

And that’s just predictive vision. What about presumptive/guiding/compelling vision?… For the sake of my sanity, I’m going to leave off here.

Until today’s official post,
Ryan