For Your Eyes Only
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a reflection of me in a shop window in London in May 2019.
The world as we know it is filtered through our beliefs and expectations, which makes the world predictable but also unremarkable. The idea is best expressed in the quote: “We do not see things as they are, but as we are.” This is both good and bad news: bad because we limit the world to our own limitations, especially when we are “waiting for the other shoe to drop” (anticipating disturbance); good because we can change the world we live in by broadening our perception of it. That is my goal: to live in a magic world, where amazing things happen, both challenging and rewarding!
Imagine you found, tucked into your pocket, a folded note, dated today, the words “for your eyes only” on the outer fold, written by your own hand in the uncanny ink of deja vu, and you felt, in that moment, snaking up your spine a hair-raising shiver of deep knowing that you have lived this all before. Would your heart race with dread and anticipation at the message you crafted for yourself, wondering: Is it a warning? An invitation? A grief? A gift? Would your mind wander back to those days when you felt anxious at the letterbox, hesitant at the ring, because you lived your life waiting for the other shoe to drop?
This is another letter in the series of Letters to Future Self written t July 3-5, 2018 to be read on June 2, 2019. Click here or the tag below to read more entries.
Or would you feel swept up into a realm of wonder, like the child you once were busting with unimaginable joy and the can’t-wait eagerness to rip open a wrapped gift or walk through the Disney gates into a magical adventure. And this little note that you hold in your hands holds the keys to the moment, opens a portal to the dream gate you have always wished to find, offers you a ticket to ride to a secret destination. Like all good wish crafters, deep down, you know, it lives within you. You know what you will get rises from own depths. So, take all the time you need to set your house in order, to list the things you love, knowing there is no allowance for baggage because you can only take what you can carry on in your heart.
And that’s where you enter into the secret chamber of your desire, where you open the window on the world of your longing, where you step out onto the ground your becoming, where you immerse yourself in the poetry of life flooded with new memories as if you have always lived free. Looking back, you see all your joys and sorrows, all your suffering and celebrating as chords in a song of haunting allure and mystic dazzle, your life set to music, your body indulging in every nuanced sensation with rapture. And the ticket to all this and more is here, in your hands, tucked in the folds of a note tagged “for your your eyes only” because you know that what you see is what you get.
Pondering the note, noticing nuance in your relationship with anticipation, you suddenly realize there is no note in your hands, but in the world, as if life presents itself to you tagged “for your eyes only:" everything you see, hear, touch, taste, and smell is filtered through your own modal operator of anticipation. The world you encounter is mostly shaped by the world you expect. What is your background expectation of life? Of the world? of others? What if you broadened your perception?
Note on idiom: Waiting for the other shoe to drop, or waiting for something to happen that you feel is inevitable. Originated in the tenements of New York City in the late 19th and early 20th century. Apartments were built with bedrooms on top of one another. It was common to hear your upstairs neighbor take off a shoe, drop it, and then repeat the action. It became shorthand for waiting for something you knew was coming.
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© Nick LeForce
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