Early in my high school career, which was long before cell phones or digital devices there was a fad which started with a kid bringing a book to school filled with blurry pictures. These pictures were quite unusual as when viewed in a certain way, a 3D image would appear. It was quite a skill and took time to master and I remember my friends gathering around the book and each in turn declaring ‘Yes, I see it, the head is there, the legs over there and its sitting on a bench’. No matter how hard I tried, these images would just not show themselves to me. Eventually my mom took pity on me and bought us a poster that we put up at home in the lounge. I spent what felt like hours starring at it, trying the coax the image out of the page. I would put my nose on the middle of the poster, train my eyes there and slowly step back … nothing! I would try holding a finger in the middle of the poster and squint my eyes, still nothing. Demotivated and defeated I would collapse on the nearby couch, it felt like I was the only kid who couldn’t see the these 3D images. One day while passing by the poster I saw something different, a dinosaur head in the foreground and the more I looked the body appeared in the background. It was there in plain sight. I closed my eyes and it was gone again into a blurry mess. Something had switched.
When we try too hard or when we fail to see fully what is in front of us, we can miss the obvious. Seeing is a form of listening and that requires quietening of the mind and an openness to receiving what is there without judgement. In our society where opinions and judgements flow so freely it can be difficult to determine what you truly see and what you think.
Take time, what do you think about a situation, that is just as valid as the next person.
Can you look differently and see?