Though usually unnoticed unless our metaphorical spirit remains too long adrift, each one of us awakens every single day wholly surrounded by a fog that is the mystery of life.

By our vision that penetrates woefully shallow, we can only barely glimpse the people and things we keep nearest to ourselves–our family, our friends, our jobs, manifestations of our values, art we hang on our walls, objects we keep in our pockets, new ideas we met in a book yesterday, phantasmal mirages of our hopes, reminders of our seething hatred–and they provide us guide to begin clearing a way through the dense haze.

On our day’s journey, as long as we are moving about, we will undoubtedly pass by, and occasionally take on to keep close for one reason or the other, new people and things.

We choose what we follow through the fog, if anything at all, but regardless of where we are led through it or how much space within it we clear, at the end of the day we remain within the fog, which stretches beyond our knowable universe and which will close back around as we sleep to wholly embrace again, only held off from absorbing into and filling us completely by the continual, clearing movement of our dreams, which continue to seek clarity in their limited domain within the body that rests.

But again, like yesterday, our eyes will open to only the fog wall wrapping tightly around them and vague glimpses of the people and things we’ve kept closest to us through the night. As we do what we will with our day, we must remember those people and things, like us, can also only see that which they’ve kept closest to themselves. And so they, too, are invariably lost in the fog, regardless of their confidence or force of will.

Maybe each day we are getting somewhere. Maybe we are not. Either way, it feels critically prudent to ensure we keep nearest to ourselves the best partners in exploration, people and things, we’ve been able and lucky enough yet to find.