Sacred Connections: Perspective

Another revelation, and then I promise no more words about my recent cataract surgeries. About ten days ago I had the surgery on my other eye, and a couple of days later I was at the pet store I usually frequent to purchase food for my dog, SweetP. Having been cautioned not to lift anything over ten pounds, when the salesperson offered to get the food for me, I readily agreed. He asked what size bag I usually got and gave me the options; I guessed it was fifteen pounds. But when I actually looked at those fifteen-pound bags he brought me; I couldn’t imagine my usual was that large.

So, the person helping me returned with five-pound bags and I was absolutely certain they were way too small. Feeling a bit foolish that I was so perplexed by this, I suggested we look at my account, and sure enough, I had been buying five-pound bags for years. That’s when it finally sunk in, I had been looking at the world through my prescription glasses for decades, and my prescription had literally magnified everything. I had a flashback to a comment a friend made to me years ago, wondering why I cut my food into such small bites, and my not thinking they were small at all. With this new awareness, I realized they had probably been very small indeed.

I found myself wondering how else I’ve allowed things to be magnified. Visually, clearly everything. But we can magnify in other ways too. These can be challenging times for relationships, sometimes way more togetherness than we ever expected. Sometimes more separation than we’ve ever known. Sometimes the little habits that never bothered us now feel like nails on a chalkboard. Sometimes the little slights readily forgotten are allowed to fester and build. Some individuals, friends, families are doing swimmingly, but there are those who are being challenged quite a bit.

In my training as a spiritual director, one of the most relevant resources we were given was not from a sacred text but from a book on business management, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook by Peter Senge. The writing that fascinated me and that I have shared with many is on the “Ladder of Inference”. This section describes how “We live in a world of self-generating beliefs which remain largely untested.

The gist of the teaching is that we observe something, then draw something out of that observation, and very rapidly give that meaning, and make some assumptions about that meaning, and some conclusions about it, which form beliefs and lead to actions. But the ladder visual is very helpful, because if we look at these mental and emotional steps that can occur in the blink of an eye, we can understand that if each step taken is on the rung of a ladder, we keep moving further away from the ground, the simplicity of the original experience.

This may sound a bit theoretical, but it comes down to how we understand our world, how we are able to relate to each other. We’re all a bit tender these days, some days more than others. We carry concerns for ourselves and those we care about. Our stress may be about school, or income, or health, or rent, or injustice, or isolation, or no quiet space at all, and in the midst of these, feelings can fray, reactions can rapidly occur. But if we can remember to simply try to dwell on the ground of our experience and allow others the space to do that as well, perhaps we can avoid magnifying already challenging issues. Perhaps we can keep things in clearer perspective and breathe a little more easily.

In Paul Tillich’s words, how might we experience God as “the Ground of Being”? In Kathleen Singh’s writing, how might we experience “Love is a quality of the Ground of Being itself.”? When we can stay on the ground, when we can root ourselves in that ground of Being and Love, we can better nurture and receive nourishment with all of our sacred connections, even in very trying times.

A five-pound bag of dog food is truly the size it is, despite however long I saw it differently.