When my brother was in high school, he fashioned a primitive clay sculpture of a man’s head. The sculpture sits on my mantelpiece, having occupied exactly the same spot in my home for more years than I could count. Now and then it gets the feather duster, but it has never really been moved. Yesterday I picked it up and turned it over in my hands, studying the features. It was once a whole head. Over time, peaces broke off. Now, only the face remains. With its broken lips and vacant eyes, it looks like a death mask.

When I put the piece back in its place on the mantel, I realized the light was hitting it differently from it had before I moved it. With the new angle of the light, I could see elements I had missed before. In the different light, I could see my brother’s fingerprint impressions in the clay. There they were, along the sides of the nose and above the eyebrow ridges. It occurred to me that every work of art ought to be re-lit every so often. We deserve the chance to see what we missed the last time we looked. To question what we had taken for granted. To take a closer, more intentional look.

Our scars can be that way. After decades of familiarity, we come to accept them as part of our skin. But what if we could re-light our scars, our experiences, our memories? What if we could see them from a different angle, and, in seeing, learn new lessons from a different perspective?

Here’s to having the courage to grab a ladder, climb up and dust the track lighting overhead. Here’s to twisting the light fixtures, and experimenting with different angles.

And here’s to the friends who hold the ladder while I teeter overhead, burning my fingers on the dusty fixtures. All in the name of seeing with new eyes.