Eyes
To See
“It's
not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.”
Henry
David Thoreau
One of the most peculiar
things that happened in the process of painting my kitchen involved
what was missed—by the painters and by me. Behind my stove is a
backstop made of wood. It is part of the cabinet, and on its backside
is a little shelf above the counter top. Now, there is an orange
shelf sticking up out of the counter in a kitchen that has otherwise
been painted white. If you saw it, you would wonder how we could
possibly have missed that. But we did. It's the same principle that
we encounter when we lay down our glasses, or our phone, or our car
keys, and can't find them again—they're right where we put them,
they cannot have sprouted wings and flown away—but somehow we can't
see them. We (at least, I) live with so many distractions that it
shouldn't surprise us when we miss or lose things. Our brains cannot
focus on ten things at once—or, if we're honest, even two.
We have this
“mind-blindness” in other areas of our lives as well. We have
learned to screen out what we don't want to see. If we are among the
privileged, we are able to drive down any street and simply not see
that most of the people we pass are not. There are homeless people,
and people who have no transportation other than their feet, and people who try to navigate
city streets in wheelchairs or on scooters. They are people just like
us, and yet we avert our eyes when we pass so that the graveness of
their situation will not sink in. I am just as guilty of this as
anyone else. We may notice them, but tell ourselves there's nothing
we can do about their situation, so why trouble our minds.
When I was part of an
AmeriCorps team back in the late '90's, we worked with people who had
disabilities. We were trying to organize private and public funding
for a downtown park to make it accessible for people in wheelchairs.
I went around to the owners of businesses that surrounded the park to
ask what they would like to see in the park and whether they would be
willing/able to help financially with the project. No one said yes,
but many said, “Get rid of those homeless people who hang out
there. They're bad for business.” They saw what they chose to
see—that unsavory people hung out and caused the good folks—their
customers—to shy away. They did not see that these poor people had
nowhere to go during the day, no place to call home. They did not
want to become part of a solution, they just wanted someone else to
make “the problem” go away.
We are all good
people—good people with blind spots. We can't single-handedly
change the lives of the poor and disenfranchised, but we can stop
pretending they don't exist. The more we are able to actually see the
vast wealth gap in America and the world, the more likely we are to
gain compassion. The more compassion we have, the better the chance
that we will help when we can. We can choose to see with the eyes of
our hearts, or only to look with the eyes of our self-interest.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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