With the eye of the heart

We live in a world where the visible is worshipped, where value is placed on what the eye can see.

So we spend time making ourselves look more appealing by going to the gym, biohacking, hopping on the surgeon's table, wearing expensive clothes. Then we use filter upon filter on a screen, smoothing and brightening until the image no longer quite resembles the person who made it.

And beyond appearances, there are the diplomas and the job titles, the things we own, the things we do- the carefully curated evidence of a life worth noticing.

All of it reaching toward the same thing: to be wanted, to be valued, to be seen.

And it seems to work, because we are often drawn first to what we can see with our physical eyes.

But every now and then, I find myself wondering what I actually want to be seen and especially loved for.

The body changes and beauty transforms. Status shifts and admiration comes and goes. None of these things can tell us who someone truly is. There is a line I love from The Little Prince: "What is essential is invisible to the eye." Perhaps this is what I think of as seeing with the eye of the heart.

What if we spent just as much time cultivating what cannot be seen?

Our kindness, our reliability, our emotional intelligence, our empathy and the way people feel after spending time with us.

And what about the relationship we have with ourselves? How does it actually feel to live inside this body?

So much of our attention goes towards how our body looks from the outside. We study it in mirrors and photographs, comparing it to an image we carry in our minds. Yet we spend far less time noticing what it feels like to be inside this skin.

What if we spent just as much time paying attention to how it feels to be ourselves as we do to how we appear to others?

What if we measured our pleasure by what we can feel from within, rather than by how desirable we appear to others?

And what if we also paid more attention to how we feel in the presence of another? Imagine meeting someone with your eyes closed, you wouldn't know the shape of their nose, the colour of their eyes, the clothes they were wearing or whether they fit today's standards of beauty or success.

You would meet them through warmth, through their voice, their energy, their humour- through the way you feel around them.

The visual has its place, I simply wonder what might change if we gave just as much attention to everything else.

And even beneath these qualities, I feel there is something more subtle still, something that doesn't seem to change, that has been with us since childhood- even though our faces, our bodies, our beliefs and even our personalities continue to evolve.

Watching my caterpillars transform this summer, I found myself wondering what it is that journeys through the egg, the caterpillar, the chrysalis and the butterfly, even though the form changes completely.

I don't know what to call it.

I only know that, every so often, I catch a glimpse of it in a moment of complete stillness, in nature, or when I look into someone's eyes and, for just a second, everything else falls away.

What if we learned to look at ourselves and each other with the eye of the heart, seeing not only the physical, earthly part, but all the other elements that make us whole, including the part that cannot be seen, measured or named?

Because there is so much more to us than what can be seen, so much more to discover and love and so much more to be loved for.

Love,

Rosie x