Looking Up

You never know what you’ll see when you look up.

Architectural details go unnoticed day after day as people walk by, self-absorbed with eyes downcast or horizon-bound, unseeing. In Copenhagen, I walked along the streets craning my neck to see what delights awaited discovery atop towers and beneath eaves, and invariably I was rewarded by glimpses of vignettes and narrations that delighted my imagination. Such situations are far less frequent here in Wellington, although I do lift my gaze by habit at particular points along my walk to work. As I pass by the now-Forest and Bird building on Taranaki St, I glance at the second window from the street, where my father used to board during his brief stint as a student in the early 60s. As I cross the Taranaki St/Vivan St intersection, the line of Pirie St disappears under Mt Victoria, past where Stacey used to live. Crossing Jessie St, the painted balcony on the apartment across the street behind Amalgamated Video catches my eye. I’m always nervous of looking up as I go by the building site on the corner of Wakefield and Tory, as if some stray tool or lump of two-by-four is poised to plummet onto my head.

In the heart of Lambton Quay, shafts of sky punctuate tall buildings. As I sit and wait for my boss to finish his telephone conversation, Mt Victoria rises, beautiful in her green cloak. Looking up is the best way to blink back tears, should the need arise.

When events in life take a turn for the better, we say that things are looking up. I imagine this means that metaphorically, one’s situation has dragged its focus from a mundane eye-level to trace the path of a soaring hawk or follow the line of a mountain. The sight of these things raises our consciousness from the little things and reinforces a sense of perspective. Again and again I learn that almost without exception, when life threatens to overwhelm me, it’s due to a skewing of perspective. I'm continually amazed by the way the slightest shift in viewpoint can have such a profound effect.