Fresh Eyes

 When you live in a place for a long time its easy to no longer see what is around you.  Sometimes it takes being away from the overly familiar to return fresh eyes to us.  That happened to me recently after spending time along the coast.  Driving up the winding road to the house on my return it seemed to me that I had never seen the woods so green and lush. The next morning, the leaves of the oaks outside my window were breathtaking.  I had ceased to see how beautiful the woods really are.

  There is a time in all our lives when we need fresh eyes. Wrestling and worrying with the same problems day after day, captured by the scripts we have created to deal with them, eventually we lose perspective and initiative. More importantly, we often lose our creativity-- that mysterious ability to connect to our intuition and open up to a new approach in our actions or attitudes or both.  Human will is a mighty instrument and we use it just as often to hold us back as to carry us forward.  It requires a fresh viewpoint every once in a while to stay balanced.

Travel has always been the great provider of opportunities to gain perspective. We allow ourselves to get out of the routine of  our lives; we let go of the scripts we have written for ourselves and branch out, maybe even grow a few leaves while we are gone. But it can happen in other ways.  Sometimes a loving  conversation can produce a much needed insight or an occasion  to see what the lives of those around us are like can inform our views about our own.. But the easiest of all may just be slowing down long enough to be lured away from the usual by the loveliness of the natural places around us. The effect is the same: to help us let go of our grip on how we have decided we have to do things and consider how we might not, or even better, might could. Somewhere in the vast space between those places the beauty of the world is waiting to help us see how that can happen.