I recently saw an acquaintance for the first time in a number of years. This wasn’t someone I was particularly close to at any point in time. In fact, I had kept my distance through the years, recalling a perceived slight . . . which may or may not have actually happened.

Our recent encounter was pleasant and full of memories. In the course of that conversation they thanked me for a long-ago act of kindness that I, frankly, did not recall.

I’ve been thinking about my long-held pique ever since that encounter and wondering how many other things in my memory are there because of misunderstandings or misremembrances. In a recent post on 70 things learned in my 70 years of life, I suggested we could all benefit by entertaining the possibility that we might be wrong. Had I simply been wrong about this individual? After decades of low-grade simmering that did nothing to bring me joy and peace, did it really matter?

About the same time as this conversation took place, a post from the Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr showed up in my inbox. In it Rohr writes about the importance of moving beyond our need to be right, especially in today’s political climate.

“In our ugly and injurious present political climate, it’s become all too easy to justify fear-filled and hateful thoughts, words, and actions, often in defense against the ‘other’ side. We project our anxiety elsewhere and misdiagnose the real problem (the real evil), exchanging it for smaller and seemingly more manageable problems. The over-defended ego always sees, hates, and attacks in other people its own faults—the parts of ourselves that we struggle to acknowledge. Of course, we don’t want to give way on important moral issues, but this often means we also don’t want to give way on our need to be right, superior, and in control. Our deep attachment to this defended and smaller self leads us into our greatest illusions. Most of us do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.” (emphasis in original)

This hit home, and I had a perfect example from my own experience. Here I was, with an over-defended ego, working to tell myself that I was right. That I was superior. Perhaps I was struggling to acknowledge slights I had given to others through the years.

My friend and mentor Frank Wade once made a similar point. “The Chinese have a saying,” Frank notes. “Most of what we see is behind our eyes.” In other words we see what we expect to see, not necessarily what is really there. We force the world into our preconceptions and because of that we miss a lot. It was Marcel Proust who once said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Rohr uses both Christian and Buddhist thought to encourage us to see things as they are as opposed to seeing things as we are. The Heart Sutra of Buddhist teachings, similar to saying “Alleluia” at Easter . . .

“. . . is liberation from our grief, our losses, our sadness, and our attachments—our manufactured self. It accepts the transitory and passing nature of all things without exception, not as a sadness, but as a movement to ‘the other shore.’ We don’t know exactly what the other shore is like, but we know it is another shore from where we now stand and not a scary abyss.”

In a time where we are all struggling to find our footing and defend ourselves against evil, taking the time to consider how we are looking at a situation—perhaps even considering how we are loving, or not loving, others—might help us, in the words of poet and songwriter Carrie Newcomer, to “pay attention to how the spirit of love is moving within us.” What new paths through the woods are we being called to create? Can we “find fresh springs of graciousness and laughter” that lighten the load we carry?”

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps on Unsplash