A Whisper of Wholeness
That which we allow to become too familiar blinds our ability to see how every thing is beautifully unique.
We stop seeing what we see every day. Not because it changes, but because we do. We settle into a kind of certainty about the people, the places, the routines that surround us. We learn their patterns. We label them. And once something has a label, we stop looking at it. The label does the seeing for us. It's efficient. And it's blinding. Familiarity isn't the problem. Familiarity is a gift. The problem is what we allow familiarity to become — a substitute for presence. A shortcut past the very things most worthy of our attention.
There's a reason a child can stare at the same tree for ten minutes and still be astonished. They haven't decided what the tree is yet. They're still letting that one tree be what it is. Somewhere along the way, we traded that kind of seeing for something faster. Something more productive. But wholeness doesn't ask us to just see new things. It asks us to see familiar things as if they've never been seen before. That colleague I think I know. That conversation I assume will go the way it always goes. That tension I've already categorized and filed away. What if I looked again? Not for something different. For everything I've been missing by being so sure I already knew what was there.
For further reflection
What is one thing that has become so familiar in my life that I may have stopped truly seeing it — and what might it reveal if I looked again with unhurried eyes?