Keep your feet on the ground.

                    "Sometimes it is less reality and more what you want to see."

Cinematic Moment:  "CM Illustrated Week" Postcard 12

A friend of mine grew up in a house on the Hudson river.  The water is just beyond a little stone wall and the view is absolutely gorgeous.  It doesn't hurt that her mother has an eye for design, a natural green thumb and a way of making a space perfect for lingering long into the afternoon.  For the record, she has since passed this trait on to all her girls, who continue to create immaculate, effortless spaces.

 As I sat on the old wooden chair one morning, looking out at the bridge linking land to land, I remembered a particular morning a month earlier.   We were stuck on the bus to White Plains, a few hundred feet from the bridge, where a man was threatening to jump.  At the time, I had been shocked by the news from the bus driver, responding to our inquiries about the hold up, but have to admit I didn't think much of it that morning, my sleepy-eyed query quickly turning to anxiety about being late to work.  Now, I thought about him in depth.  

What kind of things must he have felt standing there on the ledge, looking out into the grey water, chunks of ice floating still and angry from a cold January?  Was he scared or ready to feel the wind on his face?  Who had he left behind and more importantly, did they know how he felt?  In the hundreds of mundane moments he encountered that week, what about that Thursday morning made him feel so absolutely hopeless that the bottom of the Hudson seemed the safest place to be?  

All of the sudden, on a perfectly beautiful morning, with the spring sun shining a bit too brightly for February--I was heartbroken.  Something occurred to me about this thing we call "reality."  There isn't such a thing.  Rather, life is this endless perspective, a constant struggle with relativity and being on the right side of it.  It will always get the best of us if we allow it to.  It's our job, be it a difficult one,  to not let that happen.

 The man on the bridge ended up living through the fall.  There is a chance he has gone on to see reality a bit differently.  I hope he's drawn himself out of the ice water.