Did you ever notice that how you look at something depends on how you look at it?
Think about it for a moment.
OK, think about it for another moment, or a couple of moments—that was too quick. Really, go ahead. Think away.
Done thinking? Well, I’m not. Because what I said may be easy to understand for some of you, but not for some of me, and I was the one who asked the question. I thought about it a lot the other day and I get it, but I don’t really get it. Get it?
Here’s how it works: How you look at something today can be and almost always is different than the way someone else may look at it. And it may even be different than the way you yourself look at it tomorrow or looked at it yesterday, or last year. It may even be based on how you feel that day, or how tall you stand up instead of slouching, or if you close one eye, or are sleepy, excited, bored, worried, happy, or even if you are hungry + angry about it = hangry.
I realized that the other day.
I was talking to Rol and I noticed my nose. I noticed it with my left eye first, and then with my right eye, and it was quite a surprise. I noticed it was right there, just sitting there, the way that noses do. I realized that I hadn’t noticed it before, not in that way. Not at all. I knew it was there, and I could touch it and smell with it and maybe find things in it, but I never really saw it, you know? Although I possibly, probably saw it previously but didn’t pay attention for some reason. Then, as I was talking with Rol but looking at my nose and moving my eyes around and causing him to wonder what I was doing, I realized that nobody else could see my nose the way that I could. It was my nose. Mine alone.
It wasn’t long before I realized that after all of that nose-looking, I was hungry. I guess I exerted a lot of eye energy, so I was hungry. Not hungry for a nose—that would be weird—but I was hungry in the way that I was hungry, not someone else. And even though I could describe how hungry I was, nobody else could understand just how hungry I was. Nobody but me. I was alone in my hungriness just as I was alone with my nosiness.
But then I realized that if I was the only one who could see my nose the way that I could see it and only I could be hungry the way that I was hungry, it must be the same for others. We are all alone, together. So what does it all mean?
It means that maybe I can understand others better now, knowing, although not really knowing, what they see, and feel, and are going through. Maybe, just maybe, the way they look at things is different than the way that I look at them, but not really as different as I thought. Maybe, just maybe, if you look at your own nose, and then past it, you’ll see others looking back at you, past their noses (although they probably just have one nose), and we’ll realize that we’re all more alike than we thought.
Did you ever notice that how you look at something depends on how you look at it?
