CLARITY

" Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right "

- Jerry Garcia

Clarity is the state of seeing clearly. You achieve clarity in those moments of startling insight when you are able to shift your perspective by viewing a situation in a new light. I like to think of clarity as the result of applying Windex to your soul. As you begin to view others as mirrors of yourself, it is as if you move into a new reality in which you experience life with astonishing crystal vision. You learn the lesson of clarity in the exact moments that you accomplish this perspective shift.

I achieved a moment of clarity that day when I was sixteen, when I suddenly tuned in to the running commentator voice inside my head. I saw a woman named Elaine learn clarity the moment she realized that all her anger directed at her disorganized husband was really anger at herself for embodying that very same quality. A friend of mine experienced it when she allowed herself to see that her pattern of harshly judging men was her own fear of commitment projected outward. You may learn clarity in any random moment of your life, as soon as you open your inner eyes to what your judgments of others are saying about you.

The best way to learn clarity is to identify those times when you are not experiencing it; the moments of fogginess can be clues that the lesson of clarity is being presented. When you are focused on your judgments of others, you are not using them as mirrors, and hence are stuck in the fog. When you are focused on the way someone else has behaved, you are in the fog. In essence, whenever you are disassociated from what the situation is saying about you and your perceptions, and focused instead on what it is saying about the other person, you are in the fog.

In those moments, clarity can be achieved simply by shifting perspective from other/outer to self/ inner. Those are the moments to pause and ask yourself what you are feeling and through what personal lens you are viewing the circumstance. The moment you hold up the mirror, you begin to approach clarity.