Sunday 12 November 2017

Do you see what I see?

My little Lucas has this thing where often, he won’t nurse unless he knows he has my undivided attention. With Katie, I could get away with surfing Facebook or killing zombies. Nope, Lucas has a sixth sense for when I pull out the iPad. Good thing he's so cute.



All this time just sitting leads to all this time just thinking. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how we literally don’t see things the same way as others. Even among my own siblings with the same biological parents, I have siblings with glasses and without glasses. And those are the quantifiable differences. Every now and then it blows my mind that Sterling and I can be looking at the exact same thing at the exact same time but be seeing it even just slightly different. Within my own life, the way I’ve seen things has changed. My eyes changed drastically this last pregnancy.

Oh and then there are our figurative eyes. How do we see the world around us? I think about this every time I butt heads with someone or am frustrated by something I don’t understand. Why can’t we just see things the same way?? It’s wonderfully frustrating.

Seeing things differently leads to change. It leads to innovation. It leads to common ground.

Sadly, it can also lead to discord, discouragement and oh, drama. Drama. Drama. Drama. It can destroy reputations, resolutions and worst of all, relationships.

But if we could only see eye to eye, we wouldn’t have any misunderstandings. We wouldn’t have any hurt feelings.

The way we see things shapes our world. Today, I ran over Katie for the umpteenth time. She has become my shadow of late. It’s sweet but sometimes I forget to look down. I don’t realize she’s underfoot until, well, she’s under foot. I need to remember to join her ‘down there’ more often. There is a special connection when we get down to the level of a child or a pet. Perhaps they realize just in that gesture that we’re at least trying to see things the way they do.

I don’t know that we grow out of that. When someone tries to see things from our point of view, it’s comforting. At least in my experience. They might not succeed, they might not be able to stay there for long (bad knees…) but the effort can go a long way.

Carrying the hurt and even hate of someone seeing you, your intentions, your loved ones—whatever it may be—the wrong way, it’s hard and can do much more harm than good. Conversely, wearing a lens of doom, gloom, anger, ________________ (insert bad feeling here) is also really, really wearing. So here’s my plan: take these tired eyes and let them see the light. It’s all around us in everyone we meet. Maybe it’s really, really hard to see sometimes in someone. Maybe we can’t always fight the dark but I’m ready to try. At least until Lucas lets me get back to the zombies.

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