On a Clear Night You Can See

I’ve been overwhelmed with living through an ordinary day. A decision is weighing hard on me. I find myself not knowing what to do about the simplest things. Spectacular ideas get thrown out as less than lacking. I’m in a state of disrepair, and my heart has taken roost up in my head. It makes for crowded thinking when I need my thoughts to clear. I need my wits about me to see the road ahead. I feel blind.

Still I keep walking. I keep walking. Though I can’t see where I’m going.

It’s hard to believe that some can call me visionary. When at this moment I can’t see beyond this very second. It’s like the game we used to play. Walk to the corner. Flip a penny. It decides—do we go left or do we go right? This isn’t worry, or confusion, or even something one would think of as frustration. It’s nothing of the sort. In fact, it’s sort of nothing.

I read somewhere, sometime that when you must make a decision, you will have all the information that you will need to make it. Fine. In the meantime, here I am waiting in oblivion until both information and decision bless me with their presence, so that I can get on with my life.

Like an overused guitar string, I await the crisis that will release me.

Usually I’m a Weimaraner puppy, chasing over nothing for the mere joy of living—sometimes to the point of wearing myself out. I can break your vase and fetch a stick, but no one trained me just to sit and wait for my whole future to take its time to come to me.

So I keep walking.

I could always see, but have I ever known where I was going? That could be the mystery of my life—knowing where I’m going. The road map is so deep inside. I can only find it when I’m dreaming.

I dream of everything. I dream of things that have never been—things my soul has never seen. I dream of voices in my head that speak of stories not yet told. I dream of tales in which the good guys finally get to win, and the happily-ever-afters really happen. Sometimes they occur before the story even starts, and then they happen all over again when the story ends. When I dream I never look; I never worry where I’m going.

I cannot dream through my days, so I keep walking.

I practice listening in case I might overhear just where it is I’m going. Until that day, I have to trust my feet to know. My feet know what they’re doing, but they won’t do it until I let go. When I surrender my control, they take me where I need to be.

I should have known they’d take me to the sky. I felt whole immediately. I can see. I know the universe is working. My mischief is restored, and I want to tell the world that Barbra Streisand has nothing up on me. On a clear day, she might have seen forever.

But on a clear night I can see forever . . . and a day.

I think that photo says it perfectly.

—me strauss Letting me be