On Not Seeing the Wood for the Trees

How frequently do you find yourself looking for something and not being able to find it – the car keys, a purse, an item of clothing, or a mobile phone?

This is an experience which happens to even the most organised of us, usually when we are panicking about getting somewhere quickly.

But isn’t it often also the case that having searched high and low for that elusive item you then find it in exactly the place where you would have expected to find it - the place, in fact, where you started your search. For some reason you just didn’t see it the first time around.

Life can play tricks on us in that way. The reason for this is not because of that mischievous gremlin hidden under the cupboard, determined to make life as difficult and stressful as possible for us.

The reason probably is that you embarked upon your search in the expectation of not being able to find the item in the first place. You were already hassled and you just knew that the car keys wouldn’t be in the place you left them.

In other words, the expectation you set out with, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. When this happens it’s not life playing tricks on us, but more particularly our own minds. We project our pre-conceptions into the visible world around us. We think we won’t find it, therefore we don’t.

DEEPER LESSONS

Although this may appear a trivial example of way the mind works, deeper lessons can be learned. This ability to miss out on things right in front of our eyes - not to see the wood for the trees - is precisely the kind of way magicians work their tricks on us.

More specifically though it gives us a small hint of the power our inner minds have over the ways we see the world.

If setting out with a belief that we won’t find something means we don’t see the object right in front of our eyes, then consider the effect of all our other beliefs upon the ways we perceive the world - beliefs which have been deeply embedded in our unconscious minds from early childhood onwards.

PRECONCEPTIONS

Our whole life, our whole way of seeing the world is inevitably based upon preconceptions. We couldn’t function without them. Without an inner map to find our way around the world we would have to think about everything we did. And that would be very time-consuming.

The trouble is that these preconceptions are sometimes misplaced and don’t always work to our benefit. In this way they can result in us mis-perceiving the world.

An important part of the work of therapists is to help clients to identify those preconceptions which have led them to view a particular situation or relationship in a way which is unhelpful or limiting.

So stop for a moment and consider: are there things in the world out there which you are just not seeing or that you are seeing through the lens of a misplaced belief?

JG