“Did you see that?” The senses amaze me. How can two people
standing right next to each other see two completely different things?
On a pretty day, my
husband and I like to venture out, drive around and just take in some scenery.
Which I know seems odd since we live on a farm, in the woods, surrounded by
mountains, but we do. On this particular day, we took a ride down to Spring
City, which is a sweet, cute little country town that I adore. We had some
intel that one of the oldest steam trains from Chattanooga was coming through
and we were excited to get a glimpse of it.
Not sure what time it would arrive, we went down early and parked
ourselves by the depot to get a good spot for the tripod and all the equipment
I brought to photograph the event. We
settled in a grassy area with a side street behind us and the tracks in front
of us. Beyond the tracks was the main
road and a traffic light. Perfect place to get the best shots.
About twenty minutes
into our waiting, I hear screeching from the main road beyond the tracks, then
a slam, and finally the sound of metal crunching. We all jumped to our feet to see one vehicle
had run the red light and slammed into another.
We moved closer to see what happened and there were the vehicles that
were hit along with others that had stopped when it happened. I had to be the
first to open my mouth. “That red truck
with the trailer hit that minivan.” My
husband just looks at me like I’m from another planet and says, “Did you even
see it? The Impala ran that light and hit the van, the truck was just driving
around it.” Well, that’s not what I
saw. Then my husband, a former police officer, educates me on why officers will
interview multiple people multiple times to try to decipher what the real story
is. If they all saw the exact same thing, they were probably lying!
We see what we focus on. What we focus on becomes the main
event of the story. When I looked in the direction of the accident, what caught
my eye was the red truck. It was the focal point of my viewing. Life is exactly like this. I have wasted many
days focusing on the wrong things and letting the good things slip by
unnoticed. . A few days ago, my attention was honed in on all the things I needed to do and thing
I needed to prepare for the next day. While I was in my “zone”, I
let my teenager, who actually came home after school today, go by unnoticed.
Those few moments I live for now to see him hanging around, gone because I was
focused on something else. I didn’t see
him. We all may have a different
perspective of the world around us, but we do have a choice on what we focus
that view on.
Oh, and the train? It was awesome. It flew by so fast and so
loud, that if you blinked, you would have missed it.
What are you going to focus on today? What could you be
missing while you focus on the things that are fleeting?
