We’ve been talking home theater this weekend — the realm of sight and sound — and it was a nice launching point for some things I’ve been pondering. So, I’ll leave you with this thought to day …You and I live in a largely visual world. A bright world of millions of colors, sharp focus and crisp clean edges. That’s because as eyes go, humans have a pretty impressive setup. We’re not going to win any best-in-class awards but in the all around vision category we’re at the top of the heap. Nevertheless, there remains a lot that we don’t see. We don’t detect motion as well as some animals. We don’t see as far into the infrared or ultraviolet spectrum or have as good of night vision as others.The same is true for our hearing. It’s rates as “pretty good” in the animal kingdom. Not awful by any means, but also not too exceptional. We have two ears conveniently mounted on opposite sides of our head which is good because it allows us to process sound directionally, aka: stereo. Our brains are designed to detect the speed of the delay from a sound hitting one ear first and then the other. That’s how we can tell where a sound is coming from. But even that has its limits. Put us underwater and our directional hearing is useless. Sound travels much faster in water than through the air. Too fast for our software to detect the delay. One of the first lessons that every beginning scuba diver must learn is that even though you will hear plenty of sounds in the water, you won’t be able to tell where they’re coming from. So don’t lose sight of your dive partner because, even though you may hear them, you won’t be able to follow that sound to them. For humans, hearing underwater has noticeable limits.But that’s true for all our senses all the time. We see, hear, taste, touch and feel, in ways that seem like we’re fully perceiving the whole world around us, but reality is, at every turn, far greater than what the limits of our senses will allow us to experience. My cat, my dogs, the squirrels, birds and bees just outside the window, the chickens, worms and butterflies in the garden, even my beautiful wife sitting across the table from me … all of us are occupying the same space but all of us have been given a different set of tools to experience the world through, so all of us are experiencing it in very different ways. The truth is, I always have and always will only see that fraction of reality that comes within the tiny bubble of my limited awareness. My bubble shapes me just as your bubble shapes you. It’s not a particularly comforting thought, but hold onto it long enough and you might just experience a flush of humility. And that’s always good news.Humility, by the way, is not a character trait. I know this because humility comes and goes. No one possesses it. The best we can all hope for is that at the right time it will possess us. And I can’t imagine a better thing to be possessed by, because humility is the beginning of wisdom. When it touches our relationships with other people, humility often leads to empathy, and empathy—our capacity to see the world through someone else’s eyes—is our best hope for enlarging the bubble of our awareness.The moral of the story is pretty simple. You and I don’t see the world as it is. We see it as we are. We are each shaped by the tools we’ve been given and we are each trapped inside the bubbles of our limited awareness. We didn’t ask for it to be that way but it’s true and it will always be true. We’ll never get outside our bubble but we can grow it. All it takes is a little humility, a little curiosity, and a lot of effort to try and see the world through the eyes of another. So yes, in saying this I’m admitting to you that I can’t see much and therefore I don’t know much. But I know this … if you humbly embrace the hard truth of your limited awareness, and if you open yourself to the hard work of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, then your awareness, limited though it may be, will grow...
