Every summer my family takes a trip to California and as you can imagine we do California things. We sit by the pool, eat fish, tan, get burned- you know the whole shebang. Though when we do muster enough energy to leave the poolside and head to a near body of water (some of you may heard of it, the Pacific Ocean? If you haven't Google some pics it is pretty nice) we often end up on a pier.

Now when I was little I would love going to the pier because it had those little telescope thingamabobs where you could look out at the water. I would scurry up to one and probably give my dad the puppy dog eyes for a couple quarters to make it work and 99.9% of the time that worked (the other .1% required a little extra sadness added in). I would get on my tiptoes and peer into the tiny eye holes and take in the ocean, probably half expecting dolphins or Aquamarine to pop out, forgetting where I had started my scan with all the blueness merging into one.

When the time ran out I would remove my head from the telescope and would feel as if someone just lifted my head out of the water during a game of bobbing for apples just as I was about to chomp down, in need of just a couple more seconds.

I think about this now and wonder why I was so disappointed to be done, so willing to remove myself from the big picture and just focus on a couple spots at a time. I mean that telescope really only showed a small glimpse of the beach and Aquamarine did not show up on the countless occasions I did this.

Then when I really think about it, I realize I am still continuously going back to that kind of vision. I look at things through those two small holes of a telescope closing out the rest of the world, and more often than not this limited scope does not contain the good.

It has the bad, the underserving, the cynical, the harmful, the unfulfilling, the insert 'bad' thesaurus responses here.

A distorted tunnel vision where, almost like a kaleidoscope, the result is all twisted and always giving you a headache.

With this kind of vision life starts to become a bit darker, with us narrowing in on unsatisfying parts of life and allowing the beneficial parts to be blacked out along the way. I am not super sure why my brain does this. Part of me believes it to be one of those "normal angsty teenage things" but the other part of thinks this an easy way out, an act of defiance against being happy. Silly me.

I don't know why I liked looking at those telescopes on the pier, if it was the fact I could control where it looked or if it was the idea of being closer to the things I could not get to. Whichever way it was, I wish my vision could go back to then. Instead of looking through that telescope and finding the one child crying on the beach because a seagull ate his sandwich, to seek out the beauty and the happiness.

ALSO

We cannot forget we were gifted with peripheral vision. If we were supposed to have tunnel vision God would have glued binoculars on us in the womb and, as a lady, that does not sound like it would make birth anymore fun. SO APPRECIATE IT. It is very easy to get sucked in and only see the bad like there is a rain cloud only on you BUT we were meant to see all the lovely things that cover each corner of the Earth.

Though if we must have tunnel vision, allow it to be on the ONE most important thing-

queso.

haha jk Jesus.