we all have smudged lenses 📷

HOW SMUDGED IS YOUR LENS?

I had a really powerful observation this morning about the difference between what is happening in the world and what we allow ourselves to experience as our own reality.

Some people wake up every single day and immediately and immerse themselves in the worst things happening anywhere on Earth. Even though it may seem absurd, they do this to themselves on purpose by tuning into news on their phones and TVs. The crazy thing is, they choose the news they want to believe is true and their neighbor is doing the same thing, but he is seeing a completely different report, still all very worrying “news”  About what is “new” in their worlds.

And because they can see those things, read about them, and react to them, they begin to experience those events as though they're happening directly to them.

Then there's the additional layer of bias. Every headline, every tragedy, every conflict gets filtered through a lens that has already decided who is good, who is bad, who is responsible, and who deserves blame.

And eventually, the world becomes a terrifying place populated by villains. And those villains are almost always the people who don't see the world the same way they do.

What's particularly sad is that their actual, immediate lives might be quite peaceful, safe, and full of goodness. But they're psychologically living inside a world of constant conflict.

Some people wake up in the morning, and immediately begin absorbing the worst things happening anywhere in the world.

And somewhere along the way, they begin to confuse what's happening in the world with what's happening to them.

This happened. And that happened. And can you believe what those people did?

And all of it gets interpreted through a lens that's already smudged with their own biases, beliefs, and assumptions.

It's no wonder so many people are walking around experiencing life as this terrible thing, where terrible things are always happening, and somehow, it's all the fault of the people who don't see the world through the same dingy lens.

And the saddest part?

They might be sitting in a warm, safe home, drinking a wonderful cup of coffee, surrounded by people who love them, with absolutely nothing terrible happening in their immediate world.

But they can't experience the peace of that moment because they're too busy experiencing the chaos of somewhere else.

I'm not suggesting we should be indifferent to suffering or uninformed about what's happening in the world.

I'm suggesting that there's a difference between being informed about the world and allowing the entire world's suffering to become your personal emotional reality.

You can care deeply about the world without carrying the weight of the entire world.

And you can recognize what's wrong without losing the ability to see what's beautiful.

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