Right before the twilight golden hour sets in, you have optimum sun glare.
You know the time, when the sun still sits a good hand length or two above the horizon, but still seems like its skittering out of the sky, skewing it’s rays and reflections off windshields, lighting up unexpected glares off lampposts, piercing through tree limbs full of juicy green leaves with the tenacity of a laser beam.
Sun glare.
Walking headlong into it, sometimes you can’t see much of anything. Maybe just an outline, or exaggerated shadows, or color scheming like an Instagrammer gone mad.
You can’t see clearly, so you feel like you can’t see.
But maybe...maybe we're missing something.
What do you see when you can't see what you want to see?
Maybe compromised vision is about more than degenerate eyeballs and low visibility. Maybe it’s reframing your window on the world.
Like when the wind blows your hair in your face, and all of a sudden you can’t see so your ears pick up and the voices of your fellow pedestrians wring through a little clearer.
Or when you're at an art gallery trying to see a painting through a crowd of people, and because they block your view, they crop your sight down to an amazing little detail of a corner of a canvas you would have missed had you been all alone.
Or like when you’re trying to look through the glass windows of a building and suddenly you realize that in their reflection, you can see the sky.
It’s like when the car is awash in a torrential downpour, and the light plays through the water streaming down the windows, or else you’re hunched over the steering wheel with an eagle eye on the dashed yellow road lines, and they seem brighter than ever before.
Or like when the all-conquering ivy vines burst forth with new springtime vigor and completely engulf a building. You can no longer see its architecture or bricks stacked just-so. But you can see the wind through the leaves, whether it’s fierce or fine.
If buildings were built of leaves and vines....
Walking into that a dappled and sun-blinded glare, everything takes on a new color, and movement resonates differently, and if you turned your back to it, you wouldn’t notice it at all.
So, sure, sometimes our outlook isn’t so clear. We can’t see that far ahead of us, or something has gotten in the way of the view. But maybe it’s not a debilitation. Maybe it’s an opportunity to see a little bit of something you haven’t noticed before.