October 12-B, 2022

Our perceptions are our impressions,
our understandings,
our interpretations,
our assumptions,
our inferences,
our conclusions
regarding apparent aspects of reality.

My perceptions of a mound of dirt
near the patio of our next house
on an inspection tour
with the HOA president,
matched his when he identified it
as a fire ant bed
and began telling me how to get rid of it.

My wife noticed a large flower pot
leaning against the outside of the house,
and said the fire ant bed 
was a lump of soil
that had been dumped from the pot
by the previous owner of the house.

A swift kick proved her perception
was accurate and our perception was not.

Verifying our perceptions
is a practice not often undertaken
by people who look
and take what they see
for the way things are.

Our perceptions change
when we broaden our perspective
to take things into account
that do not readily appear
in our line of sight.

We do that by seeking to see
more than we are looking at,
by asking questions that examine
our assumptions/inferences/presumptions/etc.
and expand our field of view
to explore possibilities and alternatives
that did not come immediately to mind.

Narrow perspectives are not as accurate
as broad perspectives.
Broad perspectives are more time-consuming
and troublesome
than narrow perspectives.

Seeing asks more of us than looking.

And so the importance of including
silence,
stillness,
and emptiness
in our regular pattern 
of examining and assessing 
what we are seeing/saying/doing
in a day.

Poke
probe,
explore,
consider,
contemplate,
imagine,
wonder...
transform your world
and the world of normal,
apparent, reality.

–0–