The Overhead Lights
20/20 vision
Hello, and a happy Tuesday to you.
Lately I’ve been musing about my hyper-focus on everything that feels unresolved in my life. What’s missing, what isn’t happening fast enough for my liking, what feels uncertain, and all that I wish looked different right now.
It’s as if I’ve shined a spotlight on everything I want that I think I don’t have yet, leaving everything peripheral to that in the dark.
Over the weekend, I decided to turn the overhead lights on.
It was a choice I made after sending last week’s Field Notes and noticing that, after reading it a few times, my field of vision had narrowed. I felt claustrophobic amidst my own words, a contraction in my own energy field.
Though I wrote about practicing coming into healthier relationship with the unknown, and an inherent expansion to inhabit more of that space, something about the amount of time I’ve spent - both in newsletter land and in my own life - trying to make peace with uncertainty began to feel suffocating.
It was as if I had spent so much time staring into the unknown, studying it, tending to it, learning how to be with and in it, that I had lost sight of everything else.
Last week a friend and I were texting about how many of the same patterns we are working with in ourselves are the same patterns we wrote about in journals from one, two, five, ten years ago. I found a journal from high school a couple of months ago and to my horror surprise, I found myself lamenting about similar things at 16 as I do as a 39 year old.
A sobering reminder that we are always in relationship to our patterns, in an ever-evolving relationship to ourselves.
Wherever we go, there we are.
We are the onion, always peeling back the layers. The sacred spiral of life where we don’t really ever get rid of anything about ourselves, we just come into deeper relationship and understanding of it.
Something about the claustrophobia of my hyper-fixation on the unknown and my realization that my patterns have been and may always be with me jolted me into clearer vision that this moment right now is not the whole story.
It widened my lens.
If I acted as a neutral party in my own life, standing just outside of it looking from the outside in, there is so much growth. So much beauty. So much evidence of a life that has been built through courage, trust, heartbreak, risk, tenacity, faith, and relentless becoming.
I could see with 20/20 vision that where I am now is a place that past versions of me longed to be.
LONGED.
And though that longing still lingers, it doesn’t have to eclipse everything that I once longed for that is already here.
Many of us live in a state of subtle fixation. We become so focused on the gap between where we are and where we want to be that we lose sight of everything that already exists.
And over time, that fixation starts to distort reality. It narrows perception. It amplifies scarcity. It convinces us that everything we want, who we want to be, is somewhere “out there” and that the arrival at our desired reality or version of our self is somehow more true than what’s already here.
It puts us in a state of waiting, perpetuating the separation between where we are and where we want to be.
But perception changes depending on the state and vantage point we’re perceiving from. When we’re contracted, fearful, disregulated, or hyper-focused, our field of vision narrows. We stop seeing clearly.
Zooming out matters. Not to bypass or force gratitude or pretend everything is fine, but to recalibrate and return to the real truth of your reality right now.
In my experience, reality is usually more nuanced than the stories fear, scarcity, or disregulation tell. Yes, there may be uncertainty, discomfort, things still unfolding.
But/and there may also be support. Momentum. Beauty. Growth. Love. And very likely evidence that more is working than we realize. That we are further along the path than we realize.
Sometimes the most potent thing we can do is zoom out far enough to see our own life clearly again, as if looking through someone else’s eyes. To take inventory, not of what’s missing but of what’s already here.
What are you fixated on?
What has your attention convinced you is the whole story?
And what else becomes visible when you soften your gaze?
If you’re anything like me, you might be surprised by what’s available to you in plain sight. Because when I turn the overhead lights on, I don’t lose sight of where I’m going.
I just stop mistaking it for the whole room.
Tallyho,
Jenny