Learning to See What We See But Do Not Know That We See, Episode 364
As we unfold into life one of the risks is that we become more rigid rather than more fluid, more automatic rather than taking up our freedom. And one place we might look for, and work with, our rigidity and freedom is in seeing the judgments and assumptions we make about other people.
When other people become fixed, predictable or boring to us, it may be that we are not looking with the requisite depth; or that we have rigidified our understanding of them rather than regarding them as the great and unfathomable mysteries that they are.
This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
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Learning to See What We See But Do Not Know That We See
Our awareness of ourselves and our environment is woefully deficient. In particular there is a tendency to see what things have in common rather than what makes them unique, the source of a dispiriting sense of sameness …
Our categorising tendency likes to put people in pigeon holes then notices only the behaviour that fits in with our simplistic classification and finishes by dismissing people as superficial, limited, predictable and boring. The equivalent in relationships is to see only the irritating aspects of the partner and then to turn this into a final, dismissive definition. It is common even to want others to behave badly in predictable ways in order to confirm our own good judgment and enjoy superiority and righteousness.
A crucial function of the arts is to prevent, or break down, dismissive labelling and reveal the singular instead of the similar, the peculiar instead of the familiar, and the inscrutable instead of the understood. I have often been guilty of impatient dismissiveness but recently, under the influences of literature, process thinking, and the gentle remonstrations of my wife, I have come to find even people I have known for a lifetime increasingly strange. And, strangely enough, the fact that they elude me has brought them closer; my inability to understand them makes them more understandable.
Michael Foley, from ‘Life Lessons From Bergson’
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash