Clarity

So, you walk into the eye doctor's office and sit on the little stool. He pulls down the big white robotic looking arm of vision with the binocular looking peep holes and puts it up against your face. "Tell me which is clearer 1 or 2," he says. You choose two. Then he flips a lever and flips between two other pieces of glass within the magical binoculars of the doc, "3 or 4?" You pick three. This goes on and on until the doctor gets you as close to clarity this side of lasik surgery.

Why did I walk you through that painfully boring reminder of what it's like at the eye doc's? Because it is an analogy of the point I'm going to make about life and our perceptions about life stuff.

Sometimes our perceptions are screwed up, and we need to have the magical arm of context flashed before our eyes to help us realize how much we either have not seen or have not seen clearly. I have a few quick examples of tools that I believe can help us see things more clearly.

1.Expose yourself to different cultures.
No, I don't want you to embrace your inner native and go running around the house in a loin cloth with a spear or force yourself to eat things that belong on a science fiction movie. I am also not claiming that other cultures have some deep insight that you just don't get until you've delved into their culture. I am, however, talking about compare/contrast and the value of it. An example of what I would suggest is an exercise a friend of mine used to do. Whenever going on a long road trip through a large metropolitan area, surf the radio. Force yourself to leave it in at least 5 or 6 places on the radio dial for ten minutes each that you would normally never listen to.
Again, I am not suggesting that you will be enlightened by the content of what you hear, but that you will be able to compare and contrast what you hear with what you already experience on a daily basis.

2.Get historical
I am not suggesting that you have to love history or become obsessed with it, but G. K. Chesterton used a phrase "democracy of the dead". The idea is that when we in the current generation don't delve at all into what those who went before us thought, wrote, argued about, believed, etc., we are guilty of a great arrogance and snobbery. The ideas that are celebrated and widely accepted without question in our generation were many times pointedly criticized by previous generations. How do you know you are not simply being swept up by the current of the trend of our generation. We can often look back and see the wrong headed excesses and sins of previous generations, but hearing what they did and said can make us more likely to see our own before we are unable to do anything about repenting from them.

3.Read and Listen
Too often, in our age of mass media we get our information from people who don't actually know anything about the subject they are talking about(ahem....journalists....ahem) from people who haven't thought deeply about the subject they are speaking about(ahem....actors.....ahem). However, if we make it a point to occasionally tune into actual experts and thoughtful people within the various fields of interest, we will be more likely to be building our house on the intellectual rock, so to speak. I know it is easier for me to tune out with a bag of mental mush on the boob tube (and lord knows I still do my share of that from time to time), but we've got to develop habits about what we put into our mental mouths no less than what we put into our physical ones. Technology, although certainly a chief villain in making it easier for us to suck up the bad stuff, is also at the forefront of making the good stuff easier to access, but we still have to be pro active about it.

Hope this wasn't too preachy. Just trying to share some thoughts that I thought have practical merit.

Smooches and sunshine to all. :)