None of us want to be blind to the world around us and we certainly don’t want to be deaf to it either.
Yet, isn’t it remarkable how little we actually sense?
It’s everything from how two people witnessing one event will be attuned to very different details about what occurred, to why a “fresh set of eyes” will always catch what you’ve been staring at all day. In my case, it’s my wife finding something I ‘lost’ that was in front of my face the entire time.
As an evolutionary mechanism, we had to filter out most of the world or we’d just be dealing with sensory overload on a constant basis. The hunter attunes an ear towards rustling noises while paying close attention to the tracks left behind of its prey. The gatherer pays close attention to the colour of the berries and upon which branches they hang.
They may never know each other’s worlds, but they are immersed in their own, knowing it intimately. As they both perceive the world in different ways, they can guide each other accordingly, while teaching others to see the world as they do.
If we want to see the bigger things of this world, or the intimate details, we have to attune our senses accordingly. This doesn’t happen overnight and we should be wary of those who have never been on the trail to tell us how it works.
Our eyes and ears are already blind and deaf to most of the world. The challenge is finding out in which ways that is…
then accepting it, or changing it.