I go through life with tunnel vision.  I focus on tasks, processes, steps.  Sometimes this helps: if I’m writing a story, or editing a chapter of a book, I keep pressing keys and fiddling with sentences until I’m done.  Sometimes it doesn’t help: if I’m walking to the coffee shop, I move with purpose.  I have a destination, after all.  I need to get where I am going.  Even if nothing’s waiting for me there but a queue and a cappucino.

One of the many reasons I love my wife is that she forces me to look outside the tunnel walls.  She points out flowers, trees, dogs, particular formations of light, flags hanging from third-floor windows.  She reminds me that the world exists, that it’s wonderful, and that my tasks (especially the silly ones like walking to the coffee shop) don’t make any sense if I can’t appreciate the universe which is their context.

A couple weeks ago I put on Severe Tire Damage by They Might Be Giants while editing.  Generally, I listen to Severe Tire Damage when I’m doing something else, because I want to hear Doctor Worm, Anna Ng, and Blue Canary and the rest of the album is okay, I suppose.  Halfway through one of the tracks to which I’d never paid much attention, the door to my writing closet opened, and she came in, singing:

“Why did they send her

Over anyone else

How should I react?

These things happen to other people-

They don’t happen at all, in fact.”

I’d listened to She’s an Angel before, but never heard it.  But as she sang the song, the walls fell, and I had this minor-league epiphany – no Siddhartha-under-the-Bodhi-tree moment, but a burst of plain, quotidian wonder.  And I fell in love a little – with my wife, of course, I’m always doing that, but with the song, too.  After the song ended, she returned to studying for her exams, and I to my work – but I heard that song, and then, I heard the rest of the album.  It’s been the soundtrack to my last couple weeks.

Happy Friday.  If you’re anything like me, try to look outside your walls today – or find someone who can help.