|
Insight - Seeing with Fresh Eyes
He told me the tale at Christmas a year ago, on a bleached balcony at dusk under brightening, sometimes shooting stars as the evening sky deepened to indigo. A hot wind gasped off the baked land sending condensation streaming down the tall glass of the ‘something refreshing', and, in the bay below us, ruffling the black waves with frothy lace as the ice cubes in my glass were cracking in the heat.
Behind us, muted flickering voices fluttered out of the open French windows joining the pale moths flitting about the candle flames on the low table beside me. The air was thick with eucalyptus scent as the leathered leaves from the garden trees jostled each other in the hot air.
I sat with him, the other visitor, as our hosts prepared dessert. There’s a calm, still, peaceful patience about this man, an agreeable equanimity. He knows his pace and time and takes it. That sparkling evening he told me many tales, yet one stood out, a tale of youthful enlightenment, of eyes opened to detail. Of staid expectation transformed to inspiration.
When he was much younger, starting out in the big city away from an outback home, he’d worked for a large international company. He’d been there a while, had found his feet in downtown Sydney, and loved exploring the city. And so knew his way around from walking it endlessly. It, and the lives lived in it, fascinated him.
Then one day, a young Chinese woman came to work for his company. In her life, she hadn’t travelled far before let alone as far as this new country, Australia. She came from a large manufacturing city in China. She was lovely; slim, beautiful, with an open face and manner, eager to learn the country’s ways and accents. He exchanged pleasantries with her until one day, boldly, he offered to show her the city sights.
She accepted readily. He offered to do the decent thing and so arranged to pick her up from her flat the following Saturday morning at eight, take her for breakfast at a favourite cafe, then guide her on a walking tour of Sydney.
‘Saturday morning came,’ he remembered wistfully. ‘A beautiful clear blue day, and I duly arrived at the address she’d given me. I rang the bell.
She answered and invited me up to her flat. As she opened the door, she smiled and, without any introduction, said, ‘I want you to come into my bedroom’.
So I did. She was an attractive girl. I was young, energetic, single.
She led me into her bedroom. I tell you, I followed. I felt terrific.
‘Lie down on my bed’, she said.
‘Wow’, I thought, ‘What’s coming next?’
So I did what she asked. I lay down on her bed, full of anticipation. She knelt beside me and leant towards me.
‘Look out of the window’, she whispered. ’What do you see?’
I looked and there was a typical Sydney street, lined with trees, the same kind of street I walked down all the time. Nothing unusual, nothing exciting. I didn’t answer.
‘Do you see it?’ she asked, before my silence swelled and choked the room.
‘Look at the tree. And listen to the bird in the tree.’ Her excitement was palpable. ‘Look!’
Yes, right outside her window was a tree, green and abundant, and in it a bird was singing.
‘Yes, I see the tree and hear the bird singing.’
‘Isn’t it wonderful? Where I lived in China there were no trees. No birds. I heard no birdsong. It was a large dirty industrial city. Every day since I’ve lived here I’ve woken to see this beautiful green tree outside my window and to hear the heart-lifting song inside it. I have never known that.’
I lay there on her bed, stirred in quite an unforeseen way by her absolute delight in enjoying something that I took so much for granted that I forgot to look at it and forgot to hear it. Imagine never knowing the delight of lifting your face to the green of leaves, that rousing freshness deep in urban life; imagine never hearing a bird singing in the traffic pause.
We left and I showed her my adopted city, aware now of a keenness of attention to detail in her that stirred in me a new appreciation of where I lived and what I took for granted. Our sight-seeing tour began with my eyes, not hers, gazing in awe.
A day of renewing.’
|
