It occurs to me…

Photo taken of our kitchen sink at home.

Back today, thanks to Anthony DeMello in Awareness, to a recurring theme:

“We see people and things not as they are but as we are.  That is why when two people look at something or someone, you get two different reactions.  We see things and people not as they are, but as we are.”

Seems like infallible logic to me, particularly given that the principle is supported by the sage wisdom of Brad Paisley in I’m Still a Guy”

“When you see a deer you see Bambi, I see antlers up on a wall.

When you see a lake you think picnics and I see a largemouth up under that log….

When you see a classic French painting, I see a drunk, naked girl.

You think that ridin’ a wild bull sounds crazy, but I’d like to give it a whirl.”

Two people, two different perceptions/reactions.  That is not, of course, an inherent problem – people can and do see things differently.  However, conflict can arise when (hypothetically speaking, of course) when (not if, when) one person insists that his/her perception/reaction is the correct one, and in fact the only correct one (think “fake news” and “alternative facts”).  That is where the trouble starts, the trouble being directly proportional to the insistence.

The grace in all this hides in the problem itself.  If I see things as I am, it follows that when I change, it changes how I see things.  Or as DeMello puts it: “The day you are different, they will become different.  And you will see them differently too.”

Miraculously, it is the same for everyone. 

Howard Thurman writes today about “the nourishment of the Great Exposure.”  A nice phrase, no – the “Great Exposure.”

“We are surrounded every day by the exposure to sudden and devastating calamity. Despite all efforts to the contrary, there is no device by which we might get immunity from the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune.’”  Granted, some may seem to by and large escape the more outrageous misfortunes, some not, yet my experience is that I am not only a poor judge of my own misfortunes, and perhaps more so (if I perceive them at all) the misfortunes of others.  As Thurman puts it: “Life is vulnerable – always there is the exposed flank.”  This is where I hear Thurman offering the “good news/bad news” conundrum: “It is the way of life that it be nourished and sustained by the constant threat, the sudden rending.” 

I am reminded here of Coleman Bank’s translation of Rumi’s The Guest House:

A joy, a depression, a meanness

Some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor

Welcome and entertain them all

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still treat each guest honorably.

He may be cleaning you out for some new delight.

In his book, Awareness, DeMello writes about the four steps to wisdom. (I know, you’d think it takes more than four!)  Step four relates to changes, and his analogy is quite good. 

So you have an ailment and get your neighbor (who you don’t care much for, but is your only option) to take you to the doctor.  Sitting in the examination room with your doctor and neighbor you explain all the symptoms.  The doctor listens patiently, then hands you a prescription.  As you get up to leave you note than the prescription has been made out for your neighbor, not you.  So you ask your doctor how he expects you to get better by your neighbor taking the prescription, to which your doctor replies – “Exactly.”

All of which points to step four – most of the change that needs to occur in order to attain wisdom (or happiness, or such) is on me, not them.  As DeMello puts it: “We always want someone else to change so that we will feel good….  You are the one who needs to change, who needs to take the medicine.”

Howard Thurman suggests in Meditations of the Heart: “Every judgment is self-judgment.”  Those absolutes always bother me (pun intended).  Still, he has a point.  Later, he puts it in a more acceptable (less absolute) format: “What I condemn in others may be but a reflection of myself in a mirror.”  That I can declare as truth. That, or we have the same mirror.

Photo taken of the wall in my office.

The excuses I make so readily for my own transgressions should be equally available for the transgressions of others.

Photo taken on a recent run.

Howard Thurman writes in Meditations of the Heart about two kinds of ideals.  These days I instinctively recoil at anything that suggests that things are binary, but given that it is Howard Thurman, I allowed him some leeway.  (I am sure he appreciates that.)  Thurman notes that the first type of ideals are “like far-off lighthouses whose glow is far away in the distance.  They belong to the realm of the absolute and are never marred by the sordidness of the surroundings in which men work and struggle.”  Then there are the “ideals that seem to be created out of the stubborn realities I the midst of which men work and live.  They belong essentially to the stuff of life, the vary raw materials of experience.”

The sentences I loved, both for their understated nature and for the hope they create:

“It is well within the range of possibility that these two kinds of ideals will in time prove to be one piece.  The present ever-achieving ideal is seen as the nearer end of the far reaching and ultimate ideal.  When this happens, a man experiences the integration of his life.”

While I do not always perceive those two sets of ideals in the same universe, it occurs to me that Thurman has it right that while it is not often seen as such, living in the “present-ever achieving ideal” places me in “the nearer end of the far reaching and ultimate ideal.”  That is, the two sets of ideals can co-exist; they are in different zip codes, not in different universes.  The separation is more the result of problems in my own vision and my own mind, not with the ideals.  Or as Thurman puts it, it is possible that at some point a person becomes “deeply assured that what he is striving for in his little world is suddenly a part of the larger whole.”

It occurs to me that such might be the definition of peace – when a person becomes “deeply assured that what he is striving for in his little world is suddenly a part of the larger whole.”  This moment, when “I” and “we” are seen as co-existing, may be exactly what Amanda Gorman was getting at in her recent inauguration poem, The Hill We Climb:

“The new dawn blooms as we free it.

For there is always light if only we are brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.”

Text from Amanda Gorman’s awesome inaugural poem, The Hills We Climb. Galveston Photo.