I can't see it?

My wife loves quotes. We were on a vacation in Colorado and came upon a one hole bathroom in a little breakfast diner with all four walls covered with quotes. Ever since she has been adding quotes to our guest bathroom walls. People often apologize for taking so long when they use the facility, when no one would ever notice had they not made mention of it. One quote on our wall says, "all generalizations are wrong". The orator who spoke these words obviously did not see, that in fact, he was contradicting himself.

The key words I want to point out are, "he did not see". Seeing involves perception. One of the hardest things for a person to do is to see themselves. When life is happening, we react to the inputs, and some of our reactions are hard wired into us. Life comes at us in a certain way and it makes us feel a certain way. These feelings become reality to us. This reality becomes how we then process the information and react to it.

A little baby who has missed a nap, senses everything around them as being wrong, not like it should be, and the baby begins to cry, not even knowing why. A parent can see what is happening and know that a nap will set all things right. My wife knows the signs when I am lacking proper fuel and I start to become irrationally grumpy. If we happen to be out shopping at that moment, she doesn't even ask but leads me to the closest food joint to get a hot dog, or candy bar to help me out.

And in life, work situations, inputs come at us from other people, from circumstances, from mistakes, from injustice and they all cause us to feel a certain way. If we have not become a student of ourselves then we accept these feelings as fact and react back. We think we are reacting to reality, when sometimes we are reacting to our feelings that have just been pricked. We become frustrated, we do not get the results we were expecting from other people, we find that we cannot communicate to others very well, because what we were seeing as fact, they do not see at all. They don't happen to have those hard wired points that cause those feelings to fire off like you do.

These are all things that I call blind spots. We all have them. We all have known a person who lacked social awareness. They would interact with everyone else in ways that would cause everyone in the room to feel uncomfortable, with adolescents everyone in the room would even make fun of the person who was socially unaware and that person would not even know it was going on. Well those are BIG blind spots, but as I said before we all have them. The problem is, if you have them and you can't see them how can you know they are there?

This is where we need other people to be able to see a blind spot. We in fact need guides, who can tell us when we are approaching an obstacle, guides who can help us perceive those things that on our own we would never perceive. And this subject will be my next post, how leading like a sinner can help people see their own blind spots and once they see them, they are not blind spots anymore, growth has happened.