Seeing Through Change

by Ian Percy

During a consultation with an optometrist you will put your face against a machine called an auto-refractor. The doctor will flip various lenses in front of each eye asking constantly, "Does this make it clearer or worse?"

The application of the metaphor comes easily. We'll just use a Life Chart instead of an eye chart. Does your job make your ability to see what is really important, clearer or worse? Flip. Did your parents make your vision of the world clearer or worse? Flip. How about the lens of education? Flip. What contribution has your marriage made to your vision? Flip. How about the promotion you got last year? Flip. Your own heart attack? Flip. What did going through the re-engineering project do to you? Flip.

Change is simply a combination of such lenses. These change lenses are positive factors in our lives only if we can see through them to something beyond the lens itself. If the lenses are smudged and dirty we start to focus on them rather than on what they were meant to reveal to us. We start to look at the lens rather than through it and end up in a lot of stress.

Many lenses are available to you. Accounting lenses and medical lenses. Lenses for artists and homemakers. A being laid off lens and a being hired lens. Another if you're a man and another if you are a woman. There is one for poverty and one for wealth. Not one of these lenses is an end in itself. Each is simply a viewpoint through which to get a glimpse of the landscape beyond. Change always reveals something beyond itself.

Some of the lenses of our lives make things clearer in the spiritual sense, while others fog and cloud both our out- sight and in-sight. We need to learn how to positively impact the ratio of the two.

It's a spiritual version of what the Endeavour astronauts had to do for the ailing Hubbell space telescope. In addition to installing gyroscopes to keep things in balance, they replaced the Wide Field Planetary Camera so the telescope could see and record things more clearly. That's what we need -- a Wide Field Planetary Camera for our personal and corporate souls. Come to think of it, we may need a gyroscope too.

Change is the opportunity of a lifetime, learn to see through it.