Outside Looking In

This is where I am most of the time, on the outside of life, watching it go past and wondering what it's all about. I have always been an observer, and a recorder of observations. It's not really something I chose; it's a part of my nature.

Have you ever had the most intense realization about the most mundane things? Thinks like: I'm eating pizza that I made myself. I have been overwhelmed by such realizations. On some level, of course I understood not only that there was pizza, but that I'd made it and that I was now eating it. It's not as though I'd somehow failed to grasp this concept entirely. It's just that for a split second I was somehow aware of how incredible it is that a universe where pizza is possible even exists, and I was in awe. I somehow switched from 'participant' to 'observer' in my own life.

Or perhaps it was the other way around, or both at once. Perhaps I went from going through the motions to being acutely aware of my own participation in life. Whatever it was, I found myself looking at that pizza as though it held all the answers to life, the universe and everything (which is ridiculous since it didn't look a thing like 42.)

The pizza isn't the point. The point is that there is something in my nature that allows me to shift perspective at the drop of a hat. Life is constantly a case of looking at a vase and suddenly seeing two faces, and I think this is why I write. Scratch that. I don't 'think', I know. I write because no matter how much I find myself on the outside of life looking in, what I see is so fascinating that I must find some way of capturing it, recording it in such a way that I might be able to share at least a fraction of it. I write because the only other option is to sit here watching the world go by.

Do you ever have moments like this? Do you find yourself on the outside looking in? Alternately, why do you write?