When our family is on long car trips, the kids like to play a game in which they have to look around at billboards to find every letter of the alphabet in order. Whoever makes it to Z first wins. I remember playing the same game when I was a kid. The interesting thing about the game is that, once you start looking for a specific letter, it’s all over the place. I always thought I would never find the Q or X but they always appeared. The phenomenon is even more pronounced in that other classic car-game, which is counting cars of the same color. Once you start looking for the blue ones, it’s almost as if the interstate highway system is traveled exclusively by blue cars. Strangely, if you’re counting red cars, every single car changes into red.
I’ve had the same experience in writing my books. The one I’m currently working on for Angelico Press is about poetic images for Our Lady (such as the Enclosed Garden, the Ocean, the Mirror, and so on). Because those images have been on my mind for almost a full year now, every time I read the Bible or a poem or look at a painting or really just open my eyes, I see those images all over the place. I’d never noticed before how many times the Psalms refer to the ocean until I started looking for it, or the fact that the sky is blue like her mantle, or that hundreds of flowers are named in her honor. She’s been here the whole time. I just need to pay attention to actually notice.
The writer Gaston Bachelard relates a similar experience. When he started looking for examples of a certain image of water in poetry, he started finding them everywhere. The mentalist Oz Pearlman explained on a podcast recently that certain magical illusions rely on the strange way that human attention can be directed. We see what we’re thinking about and don’t notice any other details.
There’s an old illusion in which a volunteer is told to intentionally look for a certain color in the theater. Suddenly, anything of that color is front-and-center but everything of any other color is much less memorable. Pearlman can actually use misdirected attention to affect his volunteer’s ability to remember details about their surroundings.
The point is simple. We find what we’re looking for.
Same with relationships
Recently, I wrote about how skepticism isn’t necessarily the best path to gaining knowledge. I didn’t explore this particular aspect of skepticism in that essay, but one of the reasons I’m wary of a negative outlook is that, if we only look for the bad, that’s all we’ll see. If we focus on what we can’t accomplish, we completely miss what we can accomplish.
It’s the same with our relationships. When it comes to other people, we find what we’re looking for.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen arguments spark off because two people were focusing solely on what divided them. Every text or statement was given the worst possible interpretation, bad motives were assumed, and small disagreements spiraled into friendship-ending conflict.
I often wonder about my own perspective in these types of scenarios. Do my past experiences and baggage cause me to see others through a particular lens? Am I always looking for certain behaviors and motives and, because I’m looking only for them, end up distorting the interactions?
If I assume everyone is out to get me, that’s all I see. If I’m only looking for what people do wrong, habits I can judge or correct, or mistakes they make, I might be able to convince myself I’m superior because those bad things are all I see.
Maybe those things really do exist, but that doesn’t mean I have accurate overall perception. I’ve missed all the other great qualities those people possess. I’ve not noticed how kind and caring they are, how thoughtful, how humble, how talented. It’s like I’m on the road and can only see the blue cars. Or I’m at a magic show and look in all the wrong places trying to figure out the illusion. Once it happens and I noticed nothing of any importance at all, I’ve once again been fooled.
Recently, I’ve been making a concerted effort to be aware of what I’m looking for when I interact with others. When I look for the good, it’s always there. Other people always possess commendable characteristics. Even people I have conflict with, or who don’t like me, people I barely know, someone who has hurt me in the past; there’s always good to be found. Usually, far more good than bad.
When I look for it, I see it.
