First Layer of my Composition on Reflection:
The Best Possible Outcome
I was on Medicaid, and I recently lost my coverage. They figure my husband and I are doing too well, which I agree we are doing better financially. With some raises we were just starting to climb out of a hole we have been in, created by some big repairs, inflation, some dental bills, and just having kids in general. But the reality of adding a bill for health insurance, (even with the federal credit) is not in the cards for us. Especially if I think about all the house repairs we have been putting off for 5 years, and any unexpected bills in the future, or any trip to the dentist. Fortunately, they decided to keep our kids covered, that is very helpful.
So, we will have to live without that umbrella for at least a year, if not more. Hope we are lucky and nothing happens to us. Adding health insurance to the long list of things I should be paying for but can’t.
But living without that umbrella, got me thinking of this theory I have. A theory of the best possible outcome. I suppose in a time where I need to rely on good fortune, I should examine what that is.
To frame my theory, I will reflect on three memories. They are simple moments in time but paint a picture of a working understanding that I have arrived at.
In my early twenties, I had a dream. I was in a cottage up in a loft, looking down over the living room, and I held some keys out over the ledge. I dropped them, but they did not fall. They stayed suspended, in midair. I could hear the keys move, clinking metal on metal, like they were falling. They changed, in this translucent kind of way, moving randomly, and in many different positions. I woke up while they were suspended, so I have no idea how they fell or in what arrangement they ended up as.
Skip forward to last year, must have been February? I was on my way to the UPS store, to return a package before work. I get out of the car and start walking in a hurry looking at my phone bringing up the code for the return when I stumble over the curb and fall quite abruptly. So badly I have strangers yelling at me across the parking lot asking if I was ok. Embarrassed I jump up and say, “I’m fine!” Really mostly what I landed on was my keys that I had in my hand.
A few weeks later, my daughter and I return to get some items for her birthday party. I laughingly told her about what I had done and showed her the curb where I had tripped. But then I started thinking about how I felt, when I tripped. How good a mood I was in, how amused I was when it happened, how amused I am thinking about it, remembering it, reflecting on my fumble. How, considering all the variables that could have happened, my keys are all that got scraped up.
There is this theory out there that time is a block. That instead of a linear life, or maybe in combination with a linear life, we also are in touch with all time as it is being carved out. Makes me think of the uncarved block in Tao. Like the undecided block, or the undecided keys.
It all makes me wonder at the power of reflection and memory to affect our past, present, and future. How we weave outcomes and meaning into our lives. The feedback loops we give ourselves thru time, depending on the strength of the fabric we create. What was I hearing when I was twenty and forming the questions that would haunt me, leave me suspended? Maybe I was hearing the answer in the question.
I could have landed in the worse possible way, but I didn't. Maybe the more we reflect on our lives, the more feedback we give to ourselves, the more we create the best possible outcomes.
But I still want health insurance.
Second Layer of my Composition on Reflection:
The Lighthouse and the Venom
(and the Family That Tends the Light)
True reflection isn’t clean or polished. It’s raw. Sometimes painful. To reflect honestly is to draw out the venom—untangling suffering from the private subconscious so it no longer festers alone.
When we do this, something remarkable happens: that pain, once isolated, becomes part of something larger. It becomes light. Not spectacle. Not pathology. But a shared, clarifying beam—guiding others who are lost in their own fog.
Our bodies and our societies are always compensating. They manage symptoms. They rearrange priorities. They push suffering to the quiet corners. But these hidden moments—when compensation fails and vulnerability rises—are the ones that hold the most truth. They are the moments we must offer.
The lighthouse isn’t lit by our triumphs, but by the reflections we give from those fractured places. The ones we tried to hide. The ones that flickered. That nearly broke us. Those are the memories that fuel the light.
And what if that light could remember?
What if this reflection wasn’t just collective, but familial? Passed down—not as burdens or secrets—but as guidance. A presence. A kind of spirit guide, bearing the layered wisdom of those who came before. Not to tell us who we are, but to walk with us, quietly sharing memories when the moment is right.
Maybe the lighthouse isn’t just metaphor. Maybe it’s inheritance.
Not of wealth, but of presence through memory—a living guidance system for those still finding their way.