What Are You Looking At?

When you squeeze and squint your eyes to focus, is it something in your mind trying to make your eyes smaller? Is it because when you had tiny eyes, when you were a child, you could see much more?

Try to see again as a child, walking to work – all the details: grass, hedges, fences, but then try harder, forcing your sight into more of a focused lens closer to blades of grass, leaves and branches of hedges, painted wooden-pickets of fences.

Then tighten more your gaze that you might see:

Black busy bugs travel over, under, and around each towering green and brown-rusted blade bending beneath the weight of their eternal unknown mission. Twisted hedge trunks turn in synch with its community of leaves -- each uniquely shaped from the other but all working together to embrace the changing sunlight. Dimpled white daubed spackling of rough-cut wood smile back at you with what an untroubled mind now recognizes as a sea of happy faces.

Slow down and try to see the details again, become less goal oriented, and try to take in what wonders there may be before you. Do not cloud your mind with what you expect awaits at the end of the trail. Forget about the pending deadlines, the scheduled appointments, and what-might-go-wrong. Let yourself go to the unexpected pleasures of the moment.

Playing the Nintendo WII game “Marvel Ultimate Alliance” in co-op mode, with younger people:

The game allows you to play as a character from the Marvel Comics’ “universe” – you can be Spider-Man, Daredevil, Wolverine, or one of the Fantastic Four, and your mission is to battle an army of monsters and villains through the levels of cityscapes and underworlds and places-that-have-never-been.

Because it’s co-op mode, everyone must move together. If one person lingers on one side of the screen, the other players are unable to move further down whatever path lies ahead. This can be frustrating if you are the adult in the group. Your mind automatically steers toward the future, to the goal needed to continue the game.

Generally when playing with the younger set, however, you often find yourself stuck, unable to move on because one of the children remains on his side of the screen. “Could there be some secret treasure or insight I missed where he lags?” I wonder. Looking to where his character remains on the screen to discover what my group member has found, I see nothing but joy. “Look at me, I’m Spider-Man!” he shouts gleefully, pressing buttons and moving the controls – exhilarated by his ability to skillfully manipulate the hero into shooting webs and bouncing off walls.

He does not care where he's going -- what he's able to do now is what's most important.

Trying to see as a child can help you appreciate more the work of certain artists, as well. Look past the uncomfortable sights and sounds of David Lynch films, for example – forget about goals and fulfilling resolutions before “The End.”

Lynch’s eyes also see as a child. He marvels at not only what his story-telling technology can do with lights, movement, and sounds, but also how they can change the original meaning and mood into something even more marvelous.

His most recent work, “Inland Empire”, is now on DVD, and the extra features reveal no more of the film’s meaning than the film itself – their revelations instead light up the eyes of Lynch, telling us how we should view not only the movie, but perhaps the world itself.

In the extra feature, called “Quinoa” Lynch prepares one of his favorite meals for us: a grain and broccoli delight that cannot possibly taste as good as Lynch’s pleasure in preparing it. Every detail and step is slow and precise.

Patiently observe the director tapping out a small amount of vegetable bouillon cubes. “I’m gonna set this right here – prepare it for later. I’m going to open that drawer, right here, and get a little knife. Then I’m gonna just bust this up, like so, into little pieces. Then I’m gonna let it wait there. It’ll be happy waiting right here.”

He continues: “Then I’m going to go over here and get these paper towels. And I’m going to get a paper towel and fold it for later ‘cause that handle gets so hot you can’t believe it!”

Later as he waits for the dish to complete its cooking, he talks more about the making of the film:

“It was a phenomenal world that appeared in this regular warehouse that became a magical world. So many magical things came out of that, and it grew and grew and no one will ever know how it grew that way ‘cause nothing was planned. It was partly planned but the final thing, you couldn’t have planned it like that. No one could have ever planned that.

“When you do something you don’t know where it will end up and how it will marry to something -- how it could marry to something in the future. So no matter what you do – some things you do and maybe they don’t feel so correct -- when you do it feels finished or kind of finished. Or something’s not quite right, it isn’t finished – for whatever reason you sort of walk away from it and later unbelievable things can come out of that."

"It’s just like the perfect thing you’ve been looking for.”