Seeing Things in the First Place

I might have mentioned we had a good snowstorm for these parts a week or so back, 15 inches of light, fluffy snow. The world was transformed: nothing but crystalline purity everywhere you looked. No hard edges, no darkness, nothing was old or worn or tawdry.

Then came a couple of days of heavy rain that wore most of that purity away. One murky morning I sat at the piano, looking out at the street, and there were just a few smears of snow here and there, like the slime that might be left if a giant slug oozed its way across town. They were flecked with dead leaves and stained with mud. It wasn't all that inspiring, to be honest.

And then the other morning, the sun came up in a clear sky, and I couldn't help noticing that one of those smears of snow from the other day was lit with a bright, hard-edged light, as if I might be looking at an island in the Aegean or the Arctic, with the sun rising on it, making dramatic highlights and shadows on the vast peaks and valleys. Can you see it? Not a strip of grass on a small-town sidewalk, but the sea, and not a raggedy remnant of a heavy snowfall, but a mountainous island, rising from the sea on a bright morning.

At least, that was how I was reacting to it. And I would hardly say there was any kind of point to that, like "It's all in how you look at things." That's really not always true. Many things are pretty much always good, and many pretty much always bad. In the middle, yes, there are things like remnants of plowed snow that could depress or inspire as your viewpoint dictates. But I'm not sure that the important thing is how you see it, all the time. Sometimes I think the main thing is to be looking and reacting, however you might, in the first place.