When I was sixteen and first learning to drive with my mother, I nearly side-swiped a car in the adjoining lane. I still remember the fearful jolt of discovering a blind spot. I'd assumed what I could not see was not there. What a shock to realize we can miss whole parts of the world.
Learning to see beyond our perspective can save our lives. It can also reveal landscapes previously outside our imaginations. My father has told me the story of taking a course at the North Carolina Botanical Garden when I was young. The students would go out into the countryside to find and identify flowers in the wild. The course forever changed what he sees in empty fields. In fact, those fields are not empty at all. In his transformed awareness of eye-opening study, they are full of Bee-Balm, Blazing Star, Obedient Plant and Blood Root.
All around us, unseen, are cars just off to the side, flowers out in the field, and the unique and vivid worlds of others' perceptions. It's all too easy to live a life blind to this rich complexity. Dan and Chip Heath, who wrote a book on the perils of narrow perspective when it comes to decision making, have documented the "spotlight effect," in which we pay attention only to what is focal in our minds. Everything outside that sphere of illumination is rendered invisible, even to our imaginations.
Curiosity is in short supply in our culture, political discourse and even our offices. I believe it's vital to reclaim it, as it's the path to human connection and broader vistas we could never perceive on our own. It is the prerequisite to discovery, the font of creativity and the essence of influence. It's the solution to what I'm going to dub the perception paradox: that the greatest insight is to be found in the places we don't see. Continue here....
-- Katya Andresen
