It can sometimes feel rather difficult to escape the strange pressures that quietly stage and fill our everyday realities. And that might include everything from the cascade of messages to public feeds to more constant declarations. There seemed to be some underlying pressure to see things in more cleansed or purified ways. And along the way, life’s more messy, hidden layers were somehow being swept away. A truer sense of reality always seemed to be lingering just ahead, if only we could strip away some of those untidy bumps scuffing their new veneers.

Yet I never really sensed that these versions of reality carried much truth in them. They never felt all that generous in spirit. In fact, they seemed to offer rather narrow views of our existence.

The views we do engage are often already layered with countless frames by the time they arrive at us. They carry predefined wants, remembrances, fears, pressures, climates, along with thousands of small interactions shaping their surface appeals.

And a camera’s eye can never simply record those layers away as it sweeps and flashes past. Nor does a painting, screen, projection, or symbol merely reflect strictly what we want to see. I realized how we all choose, reframe, and re-edit our realities continuously, myself included. But more often than not, these edits somehow tend to go unnoticed. Nonetheless, the messier elements do remain, and will continue to creep in. They do so regardless of whether we acknowledge them or not.

And this left something I often struggled to put into words. It left traces of an experience of being truly present and alive. And it led to ways of better relating to our realities and the images we make of them. We never do see reality in its full entirety. And that seemed even more necessary to realize than ever.