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My back pagesWhen I was young, while playing outside, I would sometimes lie on the grass and look up, watching the clouds dance in the blueness of the sky. If I shifted my visual focus a bit, I could see tiny particles, probably dust, and sometimes what looked like waves of warmth, floating, suspended, in the air. This is in contrast to my own and everyone else’s usual manner of seeing: focusing on the stillness or the movement of the people and things around us. Still, every once in a while, I stop and pay attention to the background, that great context out of which things arise and become perceivable.
What makes something a thing, and therefore useful to us, and not simply unnoticed? How is it that, what for most of us is only a rock becomes for the mountain climber a handhold leading up or down?
Out of the nearly infinite number of possible perceptions that are available to us, our brains have to select and direct our attention toward those that will be most useful. Following the set of wired-in filters and perceptual tendencies we are born with, a lifetime of training gives some direction to our ongoing task of surviving, thriving, and moving ahead with our lives. We take for granted that the perceptual sets we use — the ways in which we see or hear things — are invariable. In fact, given early experiences or life-changing events, we might come to understand things from an entirely different perspective.
Recently I heard that one of my son’s dear friends was taken to the hospital, seriously ill. The news stopped me. It created a moment of empathic pain and made me pause in my daily routine, wanting to reach out to this boy and his family. The pressures of making a living to support my family, the stress of this or that unfinished project paled in comparison to that scary news.
When we are stopped suddenly by the discontinuities of life — illness, suffering, death, failure, betrayal, or some other form of breakdown in the seams of our existence — these are the times when we can be most aware of the basic elements of our experience, our feelings and values. Such times are moments of reflection, when we, by necessity, become more philosophical, more poetic, more immediate, and less concerned with goals and outcomes that can be counted with a calculator or measured with a ruler.
Any reasonably full description of the human condition must include not only the things that can be measured and collected. It must also take into account the intangibles that cannot be counted, but must be encountered, lived through, and experienced.
There is much that we can learn from our children’s innocence (a word that means “not knowing”). For example, we can learn to enjoy each moment of our lives, as we watch them, with their attention transfixed in a game or project, or gazing at a flower, or upward, toward the sky. In such moments, my children might ask, “Why do we have to leave now?”
On the other hand, as we are driving along in our car, my children will often ask me, “When are we going to get there?” I try to tell them, “Enjoy being here, in the journey.” Good advice or not, I am soon humbled to find that my “wisdom” is lost on them in favor of their expectations of a place that is not here, but somewhere else, not now, but sometime in the future, not in the car, but at the amusement park or the beach, amid the joys of youth.
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