Forgotten Perspective
No one would fault me for calling myself a writer, because that is indeed what I spend so much of my time either doing or talking about, but in truth that label has never felt completely accurate. More often I feel like He Who Shares A Perspective Through Writing. A niggling difference, maybe, but if all this writing has a taught me nothing, it’s that those niggling differences is where my work’s value lies. The perspective I am learning to share is the perspective I seek daily for myself in my own life. It is the kindest perspective I know, the most patient perspective, the most forgiving perspective, the most optimistic perspective. How often I have forgotten it hurrying through life’s circus. How easy to discard it when a moment flashes with threat, and now this lovely perspective be damned, my hackles are up and the warriors of my survival have been summoned from their barracks. Out they charge, all bayonets and bravado, and the world best beware: they know only war and its harsh and unsubtle distinctions.
Which is why I have learned to value my time at the desk. Here I can see most clearly what I so often forget day-to-day. Here the only threat is the warriors themselves, who grow restless in their bunks with nothing to call an enemy. They are men of action, my warriors, and they fear growing soft with complacency.
It would be tempting to seek a life as quiet as this desk, but even if I found a hermit’s cave, the warriors would stand guard at the cave entrance, bristling with nervous anticipation. I think they’d drive me crazy in the silence. No, it is best to take what this desk hast taught me out into the world, to hold the kindest lens I know to life, and trust what I see though it. Not even my warriors could destroy this lens, we could only forget it, and the life it has shown me would remain until I remember to see it again.
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