Feel'd Notes: Gaining Perspective

How often is it that we lie on our backs, look up at the infinite expanse of everything, and feel what it feels like to be an inextricable yet impossibly small part of something so grand and limitless? As a child growing up in the woods of New York State, such a state of wonder was ever preset. Having grown and moved around up and down the east coast of both American continents, I find such connection less and less frequent in my life.

I make myself busy. Not just because I want to sustain myself and my family, but because it’s the nature of the way my ADD mind operates. I have so many interests, all of them infinite. It’s difficult for me to decide how to spend what little time I have in this life: how to practice, what to practice, where to be, who to be. I’m run to anxiety. I’m prone to really really low thoughts, and it all affects everything in my life. But no matter how worthless and scattered I may feel from time to time, sometimes just lying down and gaining that perspective that’s bigger than my worries and tasks, I see how far I’ve come, how much I’ve changed, how much I’ve grown, how much life I have lived and have yet to live, how rich it has been — how wide and deep and peculiar.

I have been so many things to so many people, and yet throughout it I retain a single glimmer of awareness that has remained constant throughout it all. Losing touch with this perspective, I grow tired and terrified. I’m so grateful for the moments when I feel cracks in the narrative that I tell myself, and I am brought once again to an understanding of where I am and what I am to do. I sometimes forget how to have fun, and grow despondent. I sometimes forget how gentle I am, and lash out at those around me. Regardless of what you might think of me, how soft and how kind or how compassionate, there is a ferocity in me known only to those who I’ve lived with. It is as much part of me as it is not my truest nature — one of curiosity and wonder.

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