Seeing through the fog
Image: Melinda Sinclair, 2024
Fog. A form of water that, like snow and rain, can transform our world in a matter of minutes. Whatever the landscape - coast, mountain, dessert - fog can roll in and cover everything that we could see clearly only minutes before.
Where are we? Where are we going? What’s happening ahead of us? When we’re in fog, we know what it is to feel uncertain, to even feel “being lost”. It is a visceral experience. No wonder that being in fog is a well-known metaphor for uncertainty and loss of direction.
Fog can certainly be dangerous. If you’ve ever been caught in heavy fog while driving, you know that it can be scary. And sometimes it leads to horrific accidents. So fog requires us to be appropriately careful, and to be smart at assessing our risk when things are unclear.
As a metaphor for living our lives, though, there are also other aspects of being in the fog that might be worth considering.
For me, wherever I’ve lived (some places with lots of fog!) I've always enjoyed the mysteriousness of fog. I love how it conceals, and then again reveals, how the swirling of fog can make even the most common, well-known parts of our physical world seem magical.
I also love the sense of intimacy that fog creates, as it shrinks the world that is visible to us for a while. As it obscures what is far away, it confines us to noticing what is is close by.
And then there is the transient nature of fog. It rolls in, hangs around, swirls about, and then almost magically disappears at some point, as if it was never there.
Maybe fog is an invitation to practice how to just be present to what is there in the mysterious, ephemeral moments that make up our lives.
Image: Blue Fog, Acrylic on paper, 11 by 14
© Melinda Sinclair 2024
