Perspective

Had a gorgeous, foggy morning here in Central Texas today.

At about five minutes of eight, Christine and I took a ride over to the dojang to drop the kids off for their second day of Spring Karate Camp. Four hours of non-standard Tang Soo Do martial arts training -- some judo, some haidong gumdo, some sparring, some jumping drills. Interesting stuff to spice things up a bit during this week that would otherwise be spent sitting around the house, staring the TV or the computer or the Wii or the Xbox. Anyway, as I was saying: gorgeous, very foggy morning. Visibility not better than a couple of hundred feet, clearly identifiable objects rapidly dissolving into grayish shadows as we drove. Breathtaking.

I love the way the world looks on foggy days in the same way I love the way the world looks right after a particularly solid snowfall. I used to think that it was the look of the snow that was so engaging, but today it occurred to me that it's not so much the snow itself as it is the way the snow obscures parts of what is familiar. Hiding the details of what we see everyday and take for granted. Refining aspects of the old and making them, temporarily, brand new.

Fog works in much the same way: stripping away color, reducing all the noise of fine detail and revealing larger, more general form without all the background distractions. I think it's easy for us to miss the incredibly beauty of things that are all around us, every single day, just because there's simply so much of it.

It's sort of the opposite of the old cliche "can't see the forest for the trees." I think sometimes we're so used to living smack dab in the middle of the forest that we forget that each of those trees is a unique, remarkable, and amazing thing, too, and focusing on the trees can reveal things that the whole forest cannot. Sometimes it takes a little change in the weather to remind me to shift my perspective and look closer.

Mood: Mellow
Now Playing: Brian Eno, "Ambient 1: Music for Airports"