Adjust
the Focus
“The
difference, I'm learning, is what we focus on. When I focus on the
rake of experience and how its fingers dug into me and the many feet
that have walked over me, there is no end to the life of my pain.”
Mark
Nepo (The Book of Awakening)
I
have been hired by my son, the antiques dealer, to research, list and
ship items for his ebay store. This requires a lot of camera work.
Every listing has to have at least one, and usually several, photos.
Now, my eyes are in pretty good shape for someone my age, but that
close-up vision is something of a problem. So when I'm trying to
photograph a small object, and need to get close enough to show the
text or some other detail, everything goes pretty blurry. Sometimes,
the photo comes out just fine because the camera does what my eyes
cannot—it adjusts the focus. But often, when I upload the photo, it
looks as though it was captured in a dense fog. Then I have to start
over.
Life,
too, is a matter of focus. If we went back to our birth and mapped
the events on a time-line, we could find many sad happenings—losses,
misunderstandings, meanness. On the other hand, we could map all the
good things that have occurred. All of us have had both, plus many
happenings in between that compose the content of our days. We can
choose what we concentrate on. If we choose to hone-in on the former,
we will feel sad and probably more than a little resentful. If we
focus on the latter, we will feel happy and gratified. I'm not
suggesting that we pretend bad things never happen and that life is a dance of pure pleasure; that would constitute denial, even
delusion. I'm just suggesting that we give all the events of life
equal weight. The good, the bad, the everyday; those threads that
weave the tapestry.
Sometimes
to find the positive, we have to unravel many layers of negative from
around our hearts and heads. It can take a while. We may have to
reset the focus many times. The best outcome of all is when we find
the pearl of great price wrapped up in all those tattered strings.
It's there, waiting to be discovered.
In
the spirit,
Jane
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