Why our Invisibles are invisible (at your own speed - rubato)
Recap: So far, I’ve talked about optimism, pessimism, and “new” things; “Eastern” and “Western” ways of perceiving; William Carlos Williams’s suggestion that we need to moderate our desires; and my own suggestion that perhaps if we could see and understand humans (including ourselves) more clearly, if we could see “the invisible”, then perhaps we could do the impossible that Coach Frank Gaines said that only those who could see the invisible can do.
Last week, I gave you my first long list of some of the things that we have a hard time seeing. Today, I would like to explore some of the reasons behind those invisibilities or difficulties.
1. Some things are just plain difficult to see, in a literal sense.
2. Words and concepts can be problematic.
Many of the things, perhaps most, that we use shorthand words or concepts for, are even more difficult, because we are in effect inventing the meanings and denotations assigned to them. Although they may seem to be pertaining to something outside of us—“out there”, they are mostly projected “out there” from inside us, if not what is being referred to, at least what it means to us.
Since these meanings are coming from inside of us, they are subject to all kinds of individual variations in the specifics of the denotations [what we specifically mean by them], the clarity of the understanding of what we mean, the strength of our “attachment” to them, and their ‘portability’ from one person to another.
And here a particular difficulty arises, when a word or a concept is not our own, but is picked up or adapted from another person. This is particularly true when one is given to us when we are young, when we would have little or no real idea of what the words are “supposed” to refer to, the natural tendency for us is to objectify it, to treat it as if it is actually “out there”, that it is “real”, and that its meaning is fixed, that it belongs to it.
It is often only much later in life that we see through that. I know people who are of retirement age who still have approximately the same emotional attachment to some words and concepts that they picked up when they were children.
3. Sometimes, we just aren’t very observant, or aware, or we fail to wonder about what is going on around us.
4. Sometimes we are complacent, thinking, or assuming, that we already know what we need to know about whatever it is, or that it is unimportant.
5. Sometimes we have insufficient knowledge.
6. Sometimes we have insufficient understanding.
7. Sometimes we have insufficient discernment.
8. Sometimes we have insufficient maturity, or wisdom.
9. The way things “are”.
For most of what we do, most of the time, we simply become accustomed to the cultural “bubble” of assigned importances, meanings, and consequences of particular patterns of activity or thoughts. We just do things, and see things, and react to things, the way we saw being done as we were growing up, or going to college, or starting work. Our preconceptions figure prominently here.
10. There is a force, a momentum, to life.
While we are young, especially, we are exhilarated by the impetus of this dynamic complexly equilibrating organism we call our bodies, and we generally have the energy and vitality at our disposal to deal with it and enjoy it, and just “go” with us.
Get a little older, however, become involved in more things, and have responsibilities that require you to do more things than you have energy for, at times when you just aren’t ready for them, and you have to develop habits and make assumptions, or fall back on ready-made meanings and understandings, for what you have to deal with. But the impetus is still there, and the tendencies to let the accumulated wisdom of the brain-body combination take over, to just “wing” it, are still strong. We either don’t have the time, or don’t take the time, to really look into things. You have to make choices about what to look at more closely.
I remember reading a poignant letter or journal entry that had been written by a Chinese businessman or civil servant several thousand years ago, in which he wrote: ‘I always thought of myself as an observant and ‘with it’ kind of person, but, by and by, I got caught up in the “dust net of the world”, and thirty years went by, just like that.’ [double quotes indicate the actual words used; the rest capture the essence, but I cannot vouch for having remembered it verbatim.]
11. Ego.
[Actually, I could have gone on down to 20 here, with 12 through 20 being only that one word: Ego.] It is extremely difficult, not to say practically impossible, to do complete justice to the extent that our egos, our love for our own selves and what we are involved with, and what we own, skew, slant, warp, filter, fill in, exclude, color, and build up, our perceptions. Go ahead, you try it.
12. Not wanting to see (avoidance, or denial). This is related to 11.
Question: What have I missed?
Exercise
Think back to the exercise that I asked you to do last week (going about your normal life for a few hours or half a day, but taking particular effort to see things as if you were seeing them for the first time and had to report back to your usual self, who was taking a little break, what you had seen, in detail).
It may or may not be helpful, or may or may not help facilitate this exercise, if you were to visualize yourself now standing in front of a mirror and in some fashion or another either removing whatever public persona you may have been “wearing”, or ignoring it.
Think now about last week’s exercise, but assume that some of the people who you are usually around have also been taking part in the exercise - now think about what those people might have reported back to their usual selves about what they saw about, or did with, you, how you fit in the world as they see it, as part of the exercise.
Now imagine yourself continuing to look at yourself in a mirror, and think again about the reasons, listed above, for why we can have a hard time seeing some things clearly.
Is there anything in there that might help you handle problems (or opportunities) that you may be facing?
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