Perception

One autumn day many years ago, I was out walking just after a heavy rain had stopped.  It was a quiet suburban street and there were no other people out and about.  Glancing down at the grassy strip next to the sidewalk, I suddenly noticed the largest slug I had ever seen.  It was an absolutely disgusting thing, about six inches long and almost an inch thick, a mottled pale tan-brown color, glistening with slime.  I was repulsed, and nothing could have induced me to actually touch it.

After staring at it for a moment, I realized I was mistaken.  It wasn't a slug, just a leaf fallen from one of the nearby trees, which had become curled up into a tube and was now glistening wet from the rain.  Even though I was still looking at the exact same object, it suddenly was not disgusting any more.

As I observed a long time ago, what we see when we look at something depends to a very great extent on what we know about it, not just on its pure visual appearance:

What use is it for the eye to see if the mind cannot?  The bee sees the flower, but does not perceive the beauty.  The illiterate sees the lines of text but draws no meaning from them.  The ignorant looks at the Parthenon but sees only the crumbling old stone structure, not the history. What are you not seeing that is all around you in plain sight?

These days I'm more and more often reminded of this.  When I run across a picture of something like a cheeseburger or a pizza, I see a slimy, greasy, fat-clotted coagulation of animal corpse chunks and curdled animal milk.  I could barely even bring myself to touch such an abomination now, but years ago I actually used to eat things like that routinely, as many people still do.  I could see, but I couldn't really see.

I know the world is full of things that most people "see" but don't seem to perceive meaningfully, like that illiterate looking at lines of print.  It always makes me wonder what else is all around me that I see all the time, yet remain blind to.