Stargazing
This is Just in the Periphery, a newsletter about thoughts on the things we can’t quite see until we look away.
I realized early on that I am horrible at stargazing. When I was about five years old, my parents loaded my sister and I into our maroon station wagon and set out on a momentous road trip from our home in central Indiana to the much discussed wonderland of Lake Barkley, Kentucky. We were a family that tended to stay close to home, so a five hour road trip was something of a planning challenge for my mother, who was known for her quick wit, red lipstick, wild intelligence and need to outline every detail of every trip weeks in advance.
We arrived in a sweaty mess of hard shell suitcases and coordinating family outfits. My sister and I wore matching blue striped jumpers with silver zippers bisecting our midlines. We were ready for adventure: boating, inter-tubing, water skiing — all things that I had never tried but was nonetheless convinced that I would easily master. So, our days were filled with wet failures, some laughter, sore muscles. At night, we had an unexpected vacuum of sound, as for some reason we had no TV. This was likely an intentional decision on behalf of either my parents or the resort. And, given our family habit of constant television at home, I am guessing the it was the latter. But that nighttime quietness successfully drove us outside until we were sufficiently tired enough to sleep.
It was on one of these balmy nights, sitting by the lake next to my father, then in his forties and a full decade younger than I am now, that I first remember trying to properly stargaze. The night sky was absolutely filled with stars. I was still a wonder-struck child from the suburbs, so visible stars, like firework displays and unexpected encounters with cute dogs, prompted involuntary oohs and ahhs from some mysterious, embarrassing place within me. The number of stars lining the Kentucky skies threw me off in a way that felt both awe inspiring and disquieting. There were so many. I was lost in the vastness of what I was seeing and found myself completely unable to focus on anything in that sky except for a few bright places that held my attention.
I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at the time, but it’s a feeling I still recognize in my life: the moments when I encounter something that I immediately identify as important but I lack the knowledge or background to fully understand. The first Kandinski painting I ever saw in a gallery, listening to Joy Harjo read her poetry while I was a young writer, visiting the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, wiping a cold cloth along my mother’s head as she died. These magnificent, painful moments that suddenly enter our field of vision and demand our attention. They are just so incredibly big. So, we end up aligning our focus on something shiny and bright, often forgetting about the dimmer, less clear components in an attempt to make sense of it all.
My father spoke in a gentle, quiet way. He called me Patty-Pat. He asked me if I saw The Big Dipper? See, right there? Dad was a jolly sort of spirit, and his voice in my memories is often tinged with a near smile, like he was always on the cusp of telling a joke. Do you see Orion’s Belt? Look for the stars that are in a straight line. Do you see that cluster over there? No? If not, look away.
Wait, what?
If you can’t see them, just look off to the side. Then, you’ll be able to spot them.
And, then, of course, just as I looked away, I could make out the group of stars that I could not see when looking directly at them. Years later, I would study this principle in a class on perception and learn that our visual detection of dim objects is often better assessed we use our peripheral vision due to the way the rods and cones in our eyes work.
It’s just science, through and through — but what a metaphor! How many times do I find myself focusing on the brightest, shiniest action or problem in my life, unable to notice the truly important, but dimmer one operating beside it? Sometimes my neglect of these less-bright issues will make them start to burn in intensity, until they absolutely demand my direct attention but more often than not, they just stay as they as they are: still, quiet, unassuming. But what if these quiet things are actually really important? What if I’m missing them entirely because I’m just looking at all the shiny issues and problems in my life and they are equally as meaningful? And, if that’s the case, I’m wondering how to train myself to pay more attention to them by directing my focus away, towards something else that helps to illuminate them.
I think anyone faced with writers block knows this instinctively. When the words stop flowing, the story stops moving or the momentum crashes to a halt, there’s only so much that rewriting, organization and editing can do to help. Sometimes those things actually hurt the creative process. We have all felt this. It’s painful. But sure enough, if we take the time to step away, clean the pantry, go for a walk, go hiking, often our problem suddenly clarifies itself. And on wonderful, rare occasions, that act of looking away lets us see a solution that we just couldn’t find when facing the problem directly.
These are the things that we see best when they are sitting just in the periphery and I’m hoping that once I get used to spotting them, they’ll be simple enough for even my five year old stargazing self to instantly recognize.