He’s looking at the screen quite intensely today.
Maybe the one-too-many coffees got to him, though feeling jittery is akin to a guilty pleasure.
Today the weather is a bit moodier than yesterday, with less appeal to hang out on any terrace. For now he stays at home, typing away at the work he has at hand.

Glancing occasionally behind the screen helps to rest his eyes. It’s always been recommended to look away every twenty minutes or so for twenty seconds. While he used to have an app to remind him that, he trusts himself to look away often enough nowadays.

The first step to looking away is getting your eyes to focus elsewhere. With the way he is sitting, there are actually multiple points he can look at to recover from the fatigue. The first is the window on the other side of the room. The second is the tall pine tree further down the road. The third is the mountain across, sitting far away in the haze.

The window inside is already interesting enough to the eyes, it is wooden, and sitting in front of a mostly white wall. He notices that the outside trim of the window is not made of the same wood as the panels themselves. This one is slightly brighter. Maybe it was installed separately, as a way to blend the fitting with the living room. These fittings also suffered from a poorer paint job, which is okay, this is what this trim of wood is for: protecting the transparent star of the show through which he can see the world. 

There were many plants around the window, sometimes he wonder if they could feel they were on the wrong side of the divider. Could they sense that just a few feet away, plants could grow without restrictions, in free air, without a stupid wall blocking the sun for most of the day. They could never feel the rain anymore also, only this brusk refill of way too clean water through their roots when their owner didn’t forget. They couldn’t really remember the outside, as their whole life was constrained in various pots. A few owners gave them a semblance of peace when repotting them in something bigger, only to find out a few weeks later that they hit the walls again.

Focusing his eyes a bit further out lets him completely remove the window from his mind, he is now glancing at the slowly swaying tree, beautifully green at the outset of winter. The white sky behind it lets him discreetly understand how many branches and foliage build its structure. The tree weirdly stands out from all those around it, as it’s the only one seemingly not affected by the colder temperatures. While others are frail and devoid of leaves, this one is thriving, showing an its best side even when the conditions don’t seem perfect. He finds it funny how two trees sitting right next to one another can have such a different life, one choosing to wither and retreat while the other stands strong. While he knows that the cycle is normal for some trees, he can’t wait to see the sun come above this valley and see the seemingly weak trees come to life again.

It is now an even lesser effort to look from the trees to the mountain behind them. His eyes are looking at fields dozens of kilometers away. Houses are the size of a small branch of the pine tree, a plant on the inside the size of a forest on the hill. It feels easy to forget that this view is astonishing.

Looking at the other side of the valley, he can’t even think that life still goes on the same way there. All it seems is a beautiful painting, stuck in time, here for us to look at. Glancing over these fields is however glancing over hundreds of lives, animals or otherwise, going on about their day, and possibly also looking back at his direction, wondering if anyone is here and what they could be up to now.