It can sometimes feel rather difficult to escape the strange pressures quietly staging and our everyday realities. Everything from the cascade of messages to public feeds to more definitive 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 of being were somehow just 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 glossed 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 want hoard a more narrow view of our existence.

The views we do engage are often already layered with countless frames by the time they arrives to us. They carry predefined wants, remembrances, fears, pressures, climates, hours, 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 know. 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 the experiences of being truly present and alive. And it led to ways of better understanding our realities and the images we make of them. We never do see reality as it fully appears. And that seemed even more necessary than ever.