There are two things that we can not see easily. But we can, when we get attentive enough and know a little bit more about human nature.
The Frog View
A frog can not see a fly that sits still. It’s invisible to the frog. But when the fly moves, no problem! The frog can see it, he can grab it and munch it for lunch.
Well, even though you and me, we might not exactly look like frogs, we are a lot like this little amphibian.
That’s the whole catch of news. “Everything is changing! Something is different now!” That’s basically the message of every new broadcasting. It tells you about some moves.
The same applies to social media or the internet itself.
The message always is something like this: Something is new, something is moving.
A lot of movement is made in our society to catch our attention.
Which often leads to distraction. We then are little frogs with a bunch of flies over our heads, not able to catch even one of them any more.
Reducing the influx of moving things into our life may take off a lot of stress from our shoulders. On the other hand, whenever we see stagnation, whenever we want to improve life, it’s prudent to just look in the corners where nothing is moving.
Get those things moved and hooray, new opportunities arrive.
The Backpack Problem
Another thing we don’t see is our own backpack.
We all carry a backpack of uncomfortable things in life. We know we do have troubles with this, that, and the other. We sometimes may loose our temper, be impatient, forget about things, live at times in chaos. But still our backpack is not visible to us.
What we see so clearly are other people’s backpacks! We see them and we are tempted to make assumptions, pass judgement and gossip about them.
When we stop in our tracks and remind ourselves: “Wait! I do have a backpack, too, I just don’t see it right now!” we start to become much nicer people.
Training empathy is not a “fine to have” extra in life.
It’s the core objective, I would say.
Much love
and thank you for reading as always,
Anselma
