What I Only See Because I've Lived This Far

Image by @benwhitephotography from Unsplash

I read the headline twice before I understood why I'd slowed down. It wasn't the story itself. It was the small, automatic thought that followed it: what does this mean for the people I love. Not fear exactly. Just a kind of checking, the sort you do without deciding to.

At ten, I would have skipped the headline entirely. The news was something that happened on a television my parents watched, in a language of numbers and names I had no reason to hold onto. I wanted to be outside. I wanted my friends, a ball, the next hour, nothing further than that. The world was enormous and completely unbothered by me, and I liked it that way.

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are," goes the line often credited to Anaïs Nin, though no one seems entirely sure it's hers. I find that fitting, somehow. Even the quote about how we see refuses to be pinned down to a single, certain source. What I know for certain is this: the world at ten and the world at forty are the same world. What changed is not what happened in it. What changed is me.

I didn't choose that early unboetheredness. It was given to me, quietly, by people who stood between me and the parts of the world too heavy for a child to carry. I never thanked them for it at the time, because I didn't know there was anything to thank. That's rather the point of being protected well. It doesn't announce itself.

Somewhere in the years since, without a single moment I can point to, I started reading the news the way I once read a friend's face — checking it, weighing it, carrying pieces of it into my day. Not because I went looking for the weight. Because I stopped being shielded from it, and someone, somewhere along the way, quietly handed a little of it to me instead.

I don't think this is fear, though it could easily be mistaken for it. It's closer to wanting to be ready. Not so I can control what comes, because I can't, not really. But so that if something does come, I'm not meeting it for the first time, unprepared, with people I love standing behind me.

Newton wrote that if he had seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants. Historians still argue over what he truly meant by it, and I rather like that too — that even our tidiest quotes about clarity turn out to be more complicated the closer you look. But I don't need his giants to make sense of mine. Mine were never grand. They were ordinary people, doing an ordinary, thankless thing: standing between a child and a world too big for her yet, so she could spend her Saturdays thinking of nothing but the next game.

I stand a little taller now, in the way that lets me see further. Not because I've earned it. Because someone once carried the weight so I wouldn't have to, for as long as they reasonably could.

I don't know that I'd call what I feel now readiness, exactly. It's closer to a willingness to look. To not turn away simply because looking is uncomfortable, or because turning away would be easier, the way it was at ten. I watch the news now the way you tend a garden you didn't plant but have come to love anyway — not because you can control the weather, but because you'd rather know what's coming than be surprised by it.

Perhaps that's what forty looks like, more than anything else. Not more knowledge. Not more certainty. Just a willingness to keep watching, on behalf of people who are, for now, still allowed not to.