Everything has a beginning: life, friendships, love, traditions, dreams. It is at the beginning where things are the hardest, because that's when we scramble to keep grip on something unknown to us. Raw skin is exposed when you exert those muscles in hope of gaining ground. Ahead is dark, with thick waters overwhelming limbs up to the waist, cold and warm, shifting enough to keep you on your toes as you work your way forward. Strange settings unravel before searching eyes and groping hands, causing your insides to clench in certain places like your gut or your heart. There's extra warm blood circulating through your veins and you wonder if this is how greatness is born.
Excitement is in your blood at the beginning, in your entire being. Time races forward, the tingle in your fingers fade and your heightened senses have calmed, you recognize the landscape you live in, many of its complicated layers, in all of its beautiful complexity. The view is your home, the comfortable haven of your thoughts and your knowledge. It is only until that person beside you captures that same view of yours in a snapshot that casts shadows in different places, or shifts the horizon over the mountains a little to the left, to the right. You're uncertain of your own reality, if only for a moment. That moment changes lives.
Through the eyes of a stranger, life becomes something unknown again.
