Seeing the Unseen

By Andrea Muirhead

It’s cold. Its -35 degrees Celsius, as I drive down the highway. It’s been a long winter and it’s far from over. People around me are feeling the winter “blues.” I am too. But today the sun is shining brightly, so brightly that I need to wear my sunglasses.

I remember as a kid driving places with my dad and being amazed at the animals we would see from the car. One day, I asked him how he could see those totally camouflaged animals in the field. His reply was that he had trained his eyes over the years.

He trained his eyes to see what most passed by.

I have driven about 2/3 of my journey before I see it. It’s so faint that if I take my sunglasses off, it blurs into the horizon. In the Eastern sky, a huge full moon, just sitting above the tree line is so pale that it blends into the crisp winter air. It’s so big, it looks like it belongs in a scene from a science fiction movie. I am in awe at the beauty and the enormity of what I am seeing.

And that is when it hits me.

I am always in a hurry. I know I miss seeing people, situations, and beauty because I am scrambling to my next event. We fly through life missing beautiful things because we don’t take the time to see, to really see. I need- we need- to train our eyes to see the unseen and to see the overlooked.