Focus

My boyfriend and I were talking over coffee in a tiny streetcorner cafe this morning when his expression changed suddenly and he said, "Baby, whatever you do, don't look at the TV." Of course the first thing I did was turn to look. What I saw was a continuously streaming video clip of a young man being beaten to death by three other men. Over and over again they played the violent scene. The sound had been turned down low, so all we knew was based on the video and accompanying captions, which weren't at all informative. A man had been killed. We didn't know why. We didn't know when. All we were sure of was the terrible sensation of being assaulted again and again by ugly images. Feeling unsettled, we paid our bill and left to walk back home. "That was a public news program," Fede commented, frustrated. "There's something positive going on somewhere in this city. I'm sure of it! Why weren't they talking about that?" I didn't have an answer, so I didn't say anything, just nodded my head.

This evening, we sat together working to transform this blog to accommodate our new location. We sifted through the photos we've taken since coming to Buenos Aires looking for an appropriate new image. What we landed on, finally, was a tiny sliver of the most unlikely picture taken on the banks of the Rio de la Plata. It was crooked, out of focus, and not at all pretty, but there was something, some glimmer, that captured what I was feeling when I took the snapshot that made it just right. As Fede cropped and arranged I said, "It's so funny how Photoshop can work such magic. All you need is a fragment out of a total mess and you can preserve what's beautiful." "It can work the opposite too though," he responded. "Remember the news this morning?"

Life is just like that. It's good and bad, beautiful and ugly, messy and perfect, scary and sublime all at the same time. It takes acceptance of both sides to attain balance and wholeness, of course, because there will always be some of each.

Still, it's important to realize we get to choose what we zoom in on and what we crop out.