Perspective: it’s hard to come by here.
What with the tasks to do— places to walk— people to meet— meals to enjoy— emails to write— drama to be lived— workouts to be had— city trips to be made— conferences to attend— clubs to be organized— applications to—
but hey, I’m a senior, living life and as chill with the world as I’ve ever been. But with an emotion more than chill, but not as sharp as delight. Pleasure, rather. Light.
Light is infinitely fascinating. The way it falls down between the leaves on the trees, bathes the leaves on the ground, watches you step on them crisply. The complex interaction it has with wind, or its representation of shadows. People aren’t good with shadows, you know? They’re unrealistic in paintings— the perspective’s usually off—but no one notices. We notice weird faces, colors, body forms, and are quick to inform the artist. Why don’t we care about shadows? Wasn’t their importance nudged into us after millions of years? We are mystified by them instead, the intricacies of light, the patterns of inherent darkness: our visual systems confounded. Why does this confusion bring pleasure? What would we be if we could paint the sky?
The lake outside my room is sparkling. Straight-up sparkling, glittering reflections thrown up by the waves, framed in the bracket of brown-barked trees and greenery. How expensive would this home be—my room, in my dorm, an old, old brick building, overlooking a glittering lake? My parents built a house like this once. They tore down a house on a lake, and built up a new one in nine years. It was always “the cabin”: a cumbersome visit on weekends, saddled with no internet and often cold. That lake view was built up piece by piece. Wood beams in the walls and drywall and floors, to bring forth a window with glittering water. I’ve never seen any of the money wound into that house, or the amount Wellesley hasn’t offered me in financial aid. Privilege, curled around that lake view, money-presence-power in the lake’s existence. It’s beautiful, glittering water. It always is.
Smile. Even if you press the mute button on yourself, unsure of where you stand, a smile’s always the easiest, best thing to do. A half-smile, when your cheeks grow tired, happy squinting smiles when others are pleased. All driven by external stimuli, but real, all of them: how could they not be, when I mean them for a reason, every one has its purpose—that makes them more real, don’t you think? But: “What are you smiling at?” Kaitlin demands, turning towards me suddenly. Her reactions had been funny in that conversation I wasn’t a part of—I truthfully and without thinking say: “You.” “What are you trying to say?” she shoots back. “Nothing,” I say. “Nothing?” But it is nothing; I hadn’t meant anything. I hadn’t been watching that one, had lost track of my face, was fully engaged in watching the two of them interact, hadn’t thought to be aware of myself. “Sorry,” I say, as she squints at me. Private smiles, pulled out from inside yourself, sometimes externally-driven and sometimes not, just for you, meant for no one. They’re the hardest to notice and thus a surprise. The oddest things yoked with small pleasure.
Run, I think, don’t even have to think—my body’s moving before I’m aware of it, without language or thought. Run, skip, shuffle, and it’s so easy, so easy, to gallop along at will. My body will do whatever I tell it to, will move and learn and train and bring me anywhere, will be well-behaved and the best possible attachment to my mind I could dream of. Because if my mind is me, and I’m attached to something forever, what is better than limbs that move without thought, that navigate through an impossible three-dimensional world, limbs full of interactions we can’t hope to understand but try to anyway, a body that houses our minds, fights sickness and creatures, contains within itself an entire being, separate from others, a mind-reader, joyous, the product of millennia, of species and generations—bodies and their infinite complexity. No one will understand the body; we try to recreate it, edit it, and we’re so successful in our efforts wrung out over a few hundred measly years, but we’re living in this creation that is more, so much more, we could replicate it someday but create it? Could we create our bodies, what nature has adapted and developed and sculpted, so intricate, so new: could we have been the maker? Could we have created: Run?
I sing the notes with the Tower’s carillon bells as I walk along a sun-lit path, spinning and saying hello to a friend. I met a taxi driver from Ethiopia last week, and a Uber driver from Nepal. I blushed under Rosa’s praise for me when she introduced me to another member of her lab; I was thrilled to have been invited to a Kanwisher lab meeting; startled by Prof. Fee’s kindness in the stairwell. I finally talked to Tiffany for two hours: her perspective on people is so much better than mine. I am drenched in offhand kindness, sparked by tiny pleasures. Why does this exist for me? How? What beauty has been created in humans over all this time, what wayward connections have been fastened in our brains? What situations have we been born and grown into, where are these pockets of tremendous beings? Luck and privilege and ancestors, time and kindness and humanity.
This world is unbelievable, impossible, astonishing.
Perspective.