The Wisdom of Wait and See

Image credit: Darkmoon Art via Pixabay

​I’m not the greatest navigator on the sea of life. I joke that my tombstone should say, “She got into a lot of scrapes.”

Nothing wrong with scrapes, just as there’s nothing wrong with mistakes: It’s how we learn. Yet I clearly wasn’t learning because my scrapes were increasing, not decreasing. From my point of view, I was always doing my honest best and had the courage of curiosity. These are good things, but clearly I was missing something.

​Then it struck me that I am also historically impatient and struggle with mental vision to the point of declaring myself lacking in imagination. This combination of blind impatience was likely the root of the resultant scrapes of my many, open-minded (no regret) adventures. 

You think romantic love is blind? Try impatience. Add courage and you have a bold blind person leaping without looking, leading to a lifetime of scrapes.

I began to wonder what else might cause mental blindness…

Causes of Mental Blindness

• Romantic Love - Love is not blinding so much as romantic love or passionate ideas of love that never pan out in the long-term due to the very blindness that heightened emotions can cause.
• Impatience - More tripping and falling and failure comes from impatience probably than any other source. 
• Assumptions - When you assume, you make and “ass” out of “u” and “me.”
• Knee-jerk reactions - Possibly the cause of the most embarrassing scrapes due to zero time spent thinking.
• Either/or thinking aka “my way or the highway” thinking - If you’ve ever had a parent or boss like this, you probably know the negative stress and internal hurts this causes, eventually leading to chronic health problems. And I promise you that most perpetrators are blind to this fallout.
• Irrational fears, eg. fear of people who are a little different and fear of the unknown - History is filled with documented evidence that fear leads to seriously wrong and disproportionate assumptions. (Another antidote to fear is to face it, head on.)
• Always or never being on one’s best behavior - Surprise! Both narrow one’s focus leading to blindness, or rather limited sight.
• Dogmatic devotion to one’s side, whether liberal or conservative, believer or non believer - Good nature and tremendous insight flees when we group ourselves then label outsiders as wrong. Over time, it also leads to irrational fears.
• Desires or strong emotions - Passion is a wonderful thing and emotions are highly informative, but they can trigger an undisciplined and powerful ego that can be as blinding as the sun or leave one in pitch black darkness.​
• Lack of empathy​ - If we cannot mentally/emotionally “put ourselves in the shoes of another”, which is the kind of empathy being referred to here, we automatically blind ourselves to the truth of the reality of others. 

Best Behavior is Bad?

The kicker for me in there was the one about best behavior. Up until today, I’ve been a staunch advocate, simply because I believe that if we were all on our best behavior, all the time, this would be a pretty nice world to live in - for a change. Yet I had to admit that it might have limited my sight and caused me to move forward without clarity, when waiting until clarity arrived might have been the more effective, wiser compromise.

​Behaving at one’s best can also be life-draining in trying situations. When you are dealing with people who lack or eschew empathy, exhaustion can set in which can lead to knee-jerk reactions. Instead of being on my best behavior, I will shift to being on attentive behavior. Attention is key

Conclusions Thus Far

I’ve come to the conclusion that self-induced forms of blindness are behind our many scrapes in life, individually and collectively. Yes, scrapes and mistakes are useful and necessary for learning, but too much of any good thing can wear us down, make us sick, and even send us backwards in our evolution. 
 
Hindsight shows me that mental clarity preceded my successes, while mental blindness preceded my failures. When I asked “myself” what would give me clarity, the phrase “wait and see” floated up as the antidote. It not only floated to the surface, it had that spectacular feeling of resonating truth. That’s the stuff of clarity.

I conclude that that which causes any form of mental blindness would benefit from an active “wait and see” attitude.

​Friends and Enemies of Clarity

Clarity often takes time, so time is our friend, and impatience is likely the number one enemy of clarity. How much time? It’s an individual thing. However long it takes for clarity to set in, while doing our fact-finding due-diligence. Or, however much fact-finding you can squeeze in, in situations where time is of the essence or there is a fixed deadline.

​Clarity doesn’t happen without accurate understanding of stuff. Understanding can only come from  a knowledge and appreciation of the opposites of any given situation. There is a horizontal and vertical version of opposite. Horizontal understanding requires accurate knowledge of both sides of a situation, so one-sided knowledge may be the number two enemy of clarity. Vertical understanding requires both attention to detail and big picture, so detail-only views or big-picture-only views may be the number three enemy of clarity.

I must mention here that it is vital to recognize that education is not necessarily accurate understanding. Lots of professionals teach things that are not wholly true, yet they believe they are. Don’t take my word. Just look at science and history. Science is constantly correcting what we thought we knew. Therefore, assuming is another key enemy of clarity, along with refusing to recognize, own up to, and take responsibility for admitting when we have been wrong. Wrong is just another word for mistake. It is best to openly and congenially correct our mistakes for the sake of clarity.

​Wait and See

Wait and see creates the time and space needed to listen, investigate, and form a clear mental picture. Now that this is clear, time to test out this Wait and See philosophy.