Best to focus on the fragments of hope and beauty

Opinion

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This article was published 23/03/2024 (567 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I sometimes think my eyes are broken.

Well, actually, they are broken. The vision in my right eye is bad, while in my left, it’s downright horrendous.

Doctors have offered to fix my eyes, in part to remove the lenses as a pre-emptive strike against future cataracts, and in part to put in new lenses, giving me close to perfect vision in the process. Perfect vision is something I haven’t experienced since I first got glasses in grade 4, and I’m not really sure how I would deal with that. I’ve worn glasses so long that, to me, they are part of my face, and I feel oddly exposed without them.

But the mechanics of eyes are not what I’m talking about.

I think my eyes are broken because often, they see things that should be ugly, or, at the most, pedestrian, but are, to me, oddly beautiful.

A large pat of river foam, brown and grey and filled with bubbles of uneven sizes, spinning around and around in a simple trap of river current. The slow deconstruction and reconstruction of slushy frazil ice — the swirled slow mix that its melting and refreezing make, the odd hissing sound that escapes from it if you get close enough.

Ice patterns on a dirty, gritty Winnipeg sidewalk — they can stall me as I walk to work in the morning half-light, struck both by the outline of their overall shape and the way gravity and unequal downward flow generate their particular and unique jelly-mould topography.

I can even stop dead, struck still by the way light attaches to a sheet of broken glass in a bus shelter.

I know there’s probably no sense or value in generating individual stories for every small trail of discarded objects and clothing — one sneaker, a sweatshirt, a sleeping bag, a baby stroller — that you might find in a ragged line along Portage Avenue between Dominion and Wall. But I do anyway.

Or to imagine a Noah’s Ark corollary as I watch a man set up an outdoor electric sump pump, complete with a ragged power line of joined extension cords stretched to his outside plug, to keep the ocean of meltwater on his front sidewalk from reaching his foundation.

But my eyes pull it all in. It’s probably wasted time to sit on a riverbank, impressed by the wonders of physics that would make a fully-leafed-out branch, trailing in the water, draw the exact same pattern through the surface endlessly. Or to sit and watch a sprig of grass, drawing spirograph patterns in fine sand as the variable wind changes the angles of incidence and attack.

Needless to say, I get distracted easily — and happily.

I’m lucky, I think.

We are in a time when we spend our days focusing on what’s wrong: we’re being told everything is broken, and we’re believing it. I’m not just talking politics. I’m talking outlook.

We can spend our lifetimes counting all the things that are wrong or unfair or awful. I don’t want to spend however many days I might have left doing that.

I’m not a blithering optimist. Far from it.

I wake up early in the morning and sit sometimes, bereft in my sock feet, wondering if and where I will find the energy to stand up and face the day.

Days like one this past week, when a Winnipeg city councillor decided to announce broadly on his Facebook page that Free Press was censoring him — because I didn’t place his overlong op-ed piece in the paper right away, in the process bumping two other op-eds out of the paper that were already set to run. It’s hard to sit and wait for unfair attacks to fade, and an incident like that can ruin a whole day.

But no matter.

Eventually I rise, socks and all, and head out into the early morning. And almost always am better for it.

I just get caught up in wonder — and that takes me back to my eyes.

Because I don’t know where that wonder comes from, I’m deathly afraid to change the equation in some way that might unexpectedly cause it to vanish. Do I see things differently because I have two oddly different eyes working in unbalanced but constant co-operation? Would I no longer catch glimpses of things that unexpectedly harbour great beauty, if I wasn’t always out of balance and out of place with my surroundings, and always on alert?

Beauty is where you find it.

But the obverse is equally true: search out the dark, and it will find you.

Search out only the dark, and it will burrow deep into your soul.

Watch the sun coming up against the eastern Winnipeg skyline on a north-wind freezing early March morning, and wonder about the vast variations of pastel peach and blush and orange light, rather than the bitter cold seeping through the fingers of your light gloves and the tide line of trash along the nearest chain link fence.

Prefer hope to hate. It’s better for you.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca