Be Mindful of Your Lens

It's kind of strange how fast the telltale wear and tan marks on your ring finger fade after you stop wearing a wedding band. In a couple of weeks' time, by all outside appearances, that ring you wore for years might as well never have been there. Although it is no longer upsetting to me, I still occasionally look at my ring finger in a state of mild bemusement, rub my thumb across the spot on the inside where the skin used to be smooth underneath my ring and is no longer. In contrast, the marks left on who I am as a person may take months or years to go away, or perhaps, they'll never fade at all. This is a strange juxtaposition to me, but nonetheless typical of what goes on inside all of us. So many things in our lives impact us in myriad and profound ways, and it really seems bizarre that these don't have more tangible components. Nonetheless, bottom line, they don't.

But how many of us look at someone and judge who they are based upon the readily visible elements of that person? Sure, we're busy, we have a lot of demands on our time; we can't get to know everyone, and a lot of people don't want to share their story. We're going to form opinions of people - it's how we work, what we're primed to do as social beings in society. But we can try to be mindful of the fact that we don't have all the information, we only have the smallest of slices. We couldn't assess another person's being even if we did have all the information, because we still don't have their perspective. So we really need to make a conscious effort to remember this, to be open to realizing that our perceptions of a person are likely to be partial truths and misperceptions.