What We See When We Dare to Look

Sometimes clarity doesn’t arrive as light, but as a moment we can’t unsee. This is a story about one of those moments — and what it taught me about giftedness, consciousness, and staying human.

Image by ibrahim abed from Pixabay

We live in an age of selective blindness. People scroll, nod, and signal virtue, but few dare to see. Giftedness, at its core, isn’t about intelligence — it’s the unwillingness to look away when truth becomes unbearable. This is one of those moments I couldn’t look away from.

Seeing what others overlook — and carrying it until it becomes light again.

There is something I’ve never written before, not because it’s dramatic, but because it shaped the way I understand reality — and because it’s difficult to write about without hurting anyone. That’s not my intention. What I want to share is not about blame or tragedy, but about awareness — about what it means to truly see.

A few years ago, I visited Auschwitz. I went alone. I walked through both camps, quietly, almost reverently. What struck me wasn’t only the horror, but the precision — the cold, systematic intelligence behind it. Everything straight, measured, efficient. Human intellect turned into a perfect machine for destruction.

Somewhere between two buildings where prisoners were executed, I noticed something in the sand. A human tooth. I don’t know why I saw it; maybe because I always notice the small things that others overlook. I picked it up and slipped it into my pocket.

That night I hardly slept. It wasn’t fear that kept me awake, but the unbearable awareness of what I had touched. It wasn’t just an object — it was a vibration, a fragment of human memory still alive in matter. I drove home the next day, but the weight of that experience stayed with me.

Years later, when Jorien and I moved to Norway, I still kept the tooth — safely stored in a small box. One day, while walking through the botanical garden in Oslo, I threw it into a pond. It felt like the right thing to do: to return it to water, to movement, to life. And after that, I never thought about it again. Until now.

Maybe it’s because of the times we live in — how easily we forget what we are, and what we’re capable of. Maybe it’s because the world feels increasingly flat. People scroll past each other without seeing, without hearing. Safety is mistaken for peace, order for meaning.

I’ve come to see that giftedness — this heightened awareness that so many of us carry — has nothing to do with intelligence. It’s about perception, about seeing the underlying pattern and feeling the cost of it at the same time. It’s about holding complexity when everyone else seeks simplicity.

That’s why I believe consciousness is the missing language of our time. Not in a spiritual sense, but as a structural truth. Awareness is what reality is made of. Those who sense it clearly are not here to fit in, but to remind others that humanity is not a program — it’s a pulse.

When I found that tooth, I didn’t just touch the past. I touched the proof that even in annihilation, awareness remains.

Matter remembers.

And maybe that’s the lesson now: that even when systems collapse and the world seems to be closing in on itself, life keeps whispering the same message — don’t forget who you are.

Sometimes events reveal their meaning only years later. What I found that day has come to remind me that consciousness never disappears; it only keeps reshaping itself, in earth, in water, in us.

It’s the same pulse that guided me to Norway, into uncertainty, into a new layer of existence that I don’t yet understand. But that’s the point. We’re not meant to understand everything while it’s unfolding. We’re meant to stay awake inside it — to remain human, even when it would be easier not to feel so much.

Awareness never dies — it only changes form.