My Own Renaissance

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close to you forever.

I stood this weekend on the rooftop of a pink-and-green bell tower overlooking what felt like millions of red Tuscan rooftops and gripped the metal cage boxing us all in, keeping us safe but also keeping us from taking flight, which is kind of what I felt like I wanted to do. As I pressed my forehead to it and watched the golden light cast hazy shadows over the old, beautiful buildings, this thought came into my mind.

It's a line from "All the Light We Cannot See", a book by Anthony Doerr. Interestingly enough, the title of the book has also been in my thoughts. It's an idea in itself; an implication that there is light unseen, but that doesn't make the light any less there. There's something hopeful, comforting about that -- and motivating too. That there is light to seek, that everything is more than just what you see, that every person is magic inside. 

It makes me feel swept up and wonderful inside. On that rooftop, I came to understand my own kind of parable. It took climbing 413 stairs to see that view. And I mean, the city from ground level was spectacular. But there was a light that I couldn't see from the street, a light that could only be seen by climbing.

It was in Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance, that I had a renaissance of my own. Here is the place where Dante penned about heaven and hell and his Beatrice, where the Italian language was invented, where Galileo is buried. Here is the place where some of the most brilliant minds in human history dreamed their dreams, and had the ability as nearly no one before them did to make those dreams reality and those theories laws and those ideas stories. Florence is inspiring, because it is the place where people began to look for what was on the tip of the tongue, in the back of the mind, out of the corner of the eye. Those early scholars sought for light beyond what they had, and they changed everything. They had no more time than any of the rest of us, and yet they did things with that time that the world can never forget.

In all of the best experiences of my life, I have never had the luxury of being able to take my time. In each case, I knew, either consciously or subconsciously, that eventually what I was experiencing would come to the end. In the past, this would have kept me from taking advantage of the time I had, to avoid dissolving when my time was up. I spent so much time worrying -- that I'd get hurt when it was over, or that it wouldn't be worth the view in the end -- that I let a lot of opportunities pass in and out of my skies like a comet. I would convince myself that I was satisfied with my ground-level view. Without the unseen light.

But now, I have learned to seek the light I cannot see. It takes a little faith to do it -- specifically, faith in myself and my dreams. I have learned that my instincts are leading me into big and beautiful adventures, full of new friends who love and appreciate me for who I am, statues and paintings of the most beautiful human bodies constructed by artists' hands, cow tongue?? Maybe??, accordion music in the streets and on the metro, tall skinny pine trees, learning to be comfortable in front of a camera, unexpected kisses, romance & love letters, twirling, sitting by a big glass window watching a lightning storm, words and words and words and words, Florentine workshops that are definitely embued with the deep magic, and hopefully, seeking out that secret light inside me. 

Dear reader, I want you to know that it's not enough to just be in Italy to really see things. You've got to go out and see them. And it's the same for you. There is never going to be enough time for you. Open your eyes now, before it's too late, and see everything you're surrounded by. Really see it. There are so many of us walking around with our eyes closed, and so many of us content not to seek more light. I've read that it's possible for a body to be full of light, so become full. Open your eyes to what's already there that you just don't see.

When you get to the end of your life, I hope you don't have to wonder what the view would have looked like if you just kept climbing. I hope you don't wait until then to notice where the most beautiful things are hiding in your life. I hope a million images are stamped to the back of your eyeballs, moving and flickering like cinema tape across your mind. I hope there's faces of dear friends, of family. I hope there's mountains, valleys, sunsets, sunrises, stars. I hope there's puppies and Christmas lights and breath rising in a fog and sun hitting a snowbank. I hope at the end of it all you have someone who owns a lot of your heartbeats, who made you feel less alone, to be the very last thought in your head.

I am lucky. I will have the Matterhorn, and Michaelangelo's David, and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and Rainbow Row, and Alfama, and Sintra, and the beach in Portugal, and the Eiffel Tower, and Notre Dame, and the Duomo di Milano, and the Rome temple, and Venice in the rain, and the view from the bell tower in Florence, to keep me company as I leave this world behind me.

I hope when that day comes, you will feel at peace with what you have seen. I have made the decision that I will.