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You are always “just seeing light when it reaches us”. That is how looking at things works.
Let’s take the screen in front of you for example: The display emits light and the light travels through the air until it hits the photo receptive cells in your eye and the eye then sends a signal to your brain. Because the screen is so close to you, the light only takes a tiny tiny fraction of a second to reach your eye, but technically speaking you are always seeing light from the past.
If you walk up a mountain at night and look at the lights from the city below, because the distance is greater, that light takes a little bit longer to reach your eyes, but it’s still a miniscule fraction of a second.
If you look at the sun (which you shouldn’t do because it can damage your eyes) it is way farther away. It’s so far away that the light takes roughly 8 minutes to reach you, therefore you look 8 minutes into the past. One could say the distance to the sun is 8 light minutes.
And if you look at a star that is 10 light years away, the cells in your eyes react to light that has traveled through the universe for 10 years before it reached you.
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