Gaia Gallery‘s upcoming PERSPECTIVE AS POWER exhibition inspired me to write about my own experience with perspective. I’m also filing this as a travel guide to commemorate the absolutely traumatizing experience of losing my phone and credit cards in Seoul. Losing things, especially when you’re traveling, brings on a whole different level of panic, but I can assure you there is a light at the other end of the tunnel!
I don’t lose things often. Or at least that’s what I tell myself, as someone that would likely lose their head if it were not permanently attached.
It is because of my knowledge of my own forgetfulness that organization has become key to my survival. Purposely, I have attempted to forge a space around me where something “lost” is never truly lost, but in one of two places. My system seldom fails me, so much so that I refuse to bat in eye when asked where an item is. My heart doesn’t race as I come to find that said item is not in the first location, as it most definitely will be found in spot number two.
The trouble comes when I realize this item is, in fact, missing in action. It’s a dizzying and disorienting experience, as it feels as though the walls around me seem to be caving in. My vantage point, once all knowing, has scaled done to something pitiful and miniscule. Comically, it can feel as though I have regressed biologically. There I am, on my hands and knees searching belligerently, and the words continue to escape me.
Some days, the item is something tangible: glasses, a phone, or an ID. On other, much scarier days, it can be one’s sense of self, passion, or simply the will to try again. These items were, in our mind’s eye, exactly where we left them yesterday. Yet, here we are today, scared and anxious as each minute goes by, and the item we have lost appears to grow more and more distant.
The easiest thing when you are spiraling is to continue spinning. Thankfully, whether it be from outside intervention or of one’s own volition, we all stop eventually. Miraculously, time and time again, it is in our sudden stillness that we gain the most valuable, but absolutely free, commodity known to man: perspective.
In the most beautifully, tragic manner, human duality dictates that we can almost always experience the pain of loss, while sneakily gaining something. Oftentimes, that something is more valuable than what we could have ever fathomed.
Our losses startle us. They make us uncomfortable. In their worst forms, they can break us, though hopefully only momentarily.
Furthermore, even when the loss in question does not directly impact us, simply witnessing the struggle of someone else is enough to make us pause. The pause, the strangeness of losing what seemed so permanent is arguably what makes our world go round.
Each evening, we lose the Sun, only to gain the ever changing formations of the moon. In and of themselves, the arresting beauty of each sunrise and sunset symbolizes gains and losses we never truly recover from. Crazily, we lose each and every one of them, never to experience the same one twice. That’s the thing though, the cyclical, yet unique nature of lives somehow lost and found again and again, but never once the same.
Have you ever fantasized about what it would be like waking up every day and having the things that belong to us just stay put? There would be no lost shoes, keys, or even dreams. Truly what kind of life would that be? Yes, arguably a less panicked one. However, in a world where everything stays put, it’s not only items that crystallize. Our perspective, in turn, freezes up as well.
As much as I hate losing things, I think the act of losing is far from the worst thing that can happen to an individual. Still, I don’t wish the experience of losing something of value on anyone, and I’m certain you would not either. In that same breath, I would not trade my experiences for anything. To interfere with life, and the journey apparently laid out for me would be an action miles and miles further from just being disingenuous. My losses are as much a part of me as my gains. They are my reality, and they guide me to things much brighter than the darkness they are so characteristically defined by.
If we never know darkness, how will we ever grow to know how bright we truly shine?
My perspective, a collection of experiences and knowledge derived from my life, would shrink to nothing if I was suddenly able to nail down everything that could possibly fly away from me. The loss of material items continues to humble me. Unexpected death has grounded me. Humiliating heartbreak has sent me seeking out love within myself.
These are just a few of the ever evolving patchworks that make up my perspective, one of the few things in this reality that I can’t misplace.