Discovering Blindness

As a child of divorce, I remember the fighting and tension rampant throughout the household.  I remember a father who seemed absent.  I remember my mother’s distance and unhappiness.  I remember being lonely, feeling different from everyone else.  I remember acting the clown.  I remember the day I hugged my mother tightly and was told, “You give the best hugs.”

To this day, I hug with my whole being.

There are many factors I neither knew nor understood as a child.  My father’s anger and frustration, for instance, was not directed at me for being different from him and also similar to my mother in many ways.  He did not disapprove of who I was.  He was hurting, deeply so, and scared for me.  My mother’s distance wasn’t because I wasn’t worth loving, it was the pain and confusion of discovering a new facet of who she could be.

They say that hindsight is 20/20, yet there are times that it’s often more than the inability to see all of the details: it’s the inability to see anything at all.  We are inherently blind to the world around us until something, an event, person, situation, forces our eyes to open.

To what might you be blind to, dear traveller?  Are there circumstances that you may not understand or see?  Is there a reason that you react in a certain–perhaps extreme–way to a situation that may not warrant it?  Clear eyes, to you and to me, throughout this week.  I pray that we begin to see, at least dimly, some new aspect of the world around us.

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