She stood with her back against the harsh grains of barnwood that had been used to finish the inside of the house and her forehead against the glass of the sliding door. We had not been behaving. We had been fighting and she was lamenting the fact that we were awful to each other when she would have been glad to have companions at our age. To some this may seem trite, and some may hear such reproaches shout in shrill tones designed to manufacture guilt or to make a point by force rather than through artful words.

She stood with her back against the warm wood and her forehead pressed against the cool glass. The sun came out and it glinted off her glasses. The blue of her shirt became vibrant and the sunlight caught the silver shimmer of her hair. She clasped her worn and familiar hands to her chest. Quietly she murmured her joy that the sun had come out with brilliance at the end of those long days of greys and browns.

It was a rare moment in which I saw someone who could enjoy a thing for itself. There were no self conscious thoughts. This was not motivated by some philosophy or half conceived neo-paganism that attempts to expound the good in nature nor was it the cooing and excitement of someone who tries to be delighted in kitsch for the sake of irony or their latest self-image. It was the sun and it was good. That good brought her joy and a release from stress.

It occurs to me that this sort of reaction may be totally closed off to my generation; perhaps it is just to me. I am daily in the midst of people who are self-evaluating constantly. In an effort to attain some unexamined goal of "authentic" we have lost the ability to actually be so. By wondering if my actions are legitimate, I stand apart from them. (Even now I can really only think of the things I have read that influenced this thought and wonder if I am not just regurgitating.) When I see or experience something new, I am rarely absorbed; I step back and examine my reactions as much as the experience. (Is this self-analysis simply me fitting my past into a model given me by someone else?)

At some point, we must look away from the map and embark on the road but many of us have never known that there was a difference between the two.