Clarity & Confusion

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not yet understood.

Henry Miller

This is one of those moments, rare and raw, when it all makes sense. When I feel my feet on the ground. When my eyes see what's before me and what's well beyond.

I am at Starbucks. At a small table at the window. I stare out at the people passing by. At the cars starting and stopping. At the dogs scampering and sniffing. There is a bank across the street. Chase. A word I love. A word I live.

I've just been writing a chapter. A chapter about a man with a past. A man who can't stop thinking about one day when his world changed. In the last hour, this man came to life. Even though he's invisible, present only in pages I've scribbled, pages I won't show anyone yet, I saw him today. He was real to me. Walking through the sidewalks of his life, moving on, but ever stuck.

Chasing something.

Aren't we all?

I sit here, a stranger to so many, sometimes to myself, and things seem suddenly plain. I see myself as I saw this man. I am a mother. I am a writer. I am a wife. I am a person. I am an observer. A dreamer. A doubter. A living and breathing mosaic of utter confusion and utter clarity.

And here. I marvel at something. How life is both. Completely senseless and full of sense. How I suffer through shaky moments when I don't know a thing and then, suddenly, I am here, in this sweet spot, in this sweet day, and I know everything worth knowing.

And here. I marvel at something. How I can be chasing and chasing, grasping away, cursing the crippling complexity and then, bam, it's right there, right here, in front of me.

It.

In the confusion that wraps my head and my heart and my world, there is a humble order I do not yet understand. A pattern so subtle and so slippery, it can only be glimpsed and grasped in fierce and passing flashes. But is there, this order, this crisp clarity.

It is here.

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Do you believe that life is a patchwork of chaos and order, of confusion and clarity? Have you experienced unexpected moments of crisp clarity? Are you sometimes a stranger to yourself? Do you think that we are all chasing something?