THROUGH OUR LENS

We like to believe we see the world as it is.

Clean. Objective. Unedited.

But what we actually see is the world as it meets us, filtered through a lens shaped by conditioning, experience, fear, and joy.
A lens formed quietly, long before we knew we were looking through anything at all.

Our early environments polish, grind, and scratch the glass.
Family stories and inherited traumas. Cultural expectations and norms.
Moments of safety and moments of rupture.
It isn’t either/or—it is a blender of many and more.
It is what love felt like when we first reached for it.
And what happened when we needed and weren’t met.
And a myriad of other experiences in between.

Over time, the lens becomes invisible to us.
We call it reality.

Two people can stand in the same moment and inhabit entirely different worlds.
One sibling has a completely different experience of a parent.
One sees threat, another sees invitation.
One notices what is missing, another what is possible.
Neither is wrong.

Fear narrows the lens.
As do grief, loss, and trauma.
Loneliness can erode the glass, our sense of self and our felt connection to the world, leaving life harsher, flatter, stripped of colour.
When fear has been a frequent companion, the world appears unpredictable and unsafe.

Joy, when it has been tasted and received, can soften and widen the aperture.
It lets the light in.
It restores colour.
It reminds us that not every pause is a loop back into reliving past trauma, or a rehearsal of what we might say if confronted.
Stillness no longer has to be a place of defence.

Compassion is the essential component.
For self.
For frailty and imperfection.
For now, not on Monday, or when we feel more whole or more together, but in the ever-present now.
Now.
Now.

We argue over facts when we are really defendinglenses.
We label others as naïve or cynical, too sensitive or too cold, when they are responding honestly to what they see.
We forget that our seeing is not neutral, it is relational, historical,
embodied.

And yet.
The lens is not fixed.

With awareness, something begins to shift.
We start to notice when we are reacting to memory rather than moment.
When fear is inherited rather than present.
When our seeing has become protective rather than curious.

And sometimes, often quietly, unexpectedly, the lens doesn’t just widen.
It transforms.

A glimpse, or the possibility, of a kaleidoscopic lens emerges.
A way of seeing that does not deny pain or bypass challenge, but includes them, alongside wonder.
Alongside beauty.
Alongside mystery.
With grace.

The kaleidoscopic lens sees magic not as fantasy, but as presence fully perceived.
Miracles not as exceptions, but as what becomes visible when we are paying attention.
It recognises oneness not as an idea, but as a lived experience, felt in the body, sensed in connection, and quietly echoed.

Through this lens, separation softens.
Edges blur.
The illusion of isolation gives way to interconnection.
Everything belongs.

This is the lens of love, not sentimental or conditional love, but love as a state of being.
Love that knows itself as part of everything it encounters.
Love that does not ask the world to be different before it opens.

And perhaps this is the remembering beneath all thework.

That we are not meant to perfect our lens, but toallow it to become more spacious.
More colourful.
More alive.

And also to remember that the lens can shift, change, blur, dim.
And that this, too, is okay.
With conscious awareness, there is less attachment to what we are seeing and how.
It is simply the lens in that moment.

Legacy, then, is not only what we leave behind, but how we invite others to see.

Every interaction alters the lens of those around us.
We leave imprints in how safe a room feels.
In whether curiosity survives disappointment.
In whether boredom becomes emptiness, or a doorway into wonder.

The invitation is gentle.

To notice how we are seeing.
To hold our lens with humility.
To dare, sometimes, to look through love, and through challenge, because life is not always pretty, nor is it meant to be.
The world has always been alive with colour and possibility.
It is our willingness to see beyond what life has taught us
that slowly reminds us it is still safe to dream.