You’ve heard of beer goggles right. The experience of allowing alcohol to somewhat taint a persons normal scale of attractiveness for the opposite sex.
Well maybe we don’t actually need alcohol to taint our view of people.
Maybe we allow our picture, our framing story of a person’s life to form an inaccurate view of a person we barely know. A wrong view no less.
Last night we had dinner with some friends and in the course of the meal we were chatting about one of our friend’s parents. I was really surprised to learn some cool and funky things about the dad. I have known that person from a far and never would have pictured him in the context I was told about. I was pleasantly surprised.
I think I do that more often than I care to admit.
It was as though I was looking through an orange bottle at a person. My framing story was wrong. My view was tainted.
161 | 365 Yesterday I forgot to take my camera with me, so this is a shot from my phone.
Month: March 2010 (Page 3 of 3)
10 years ago today a great challenge was before me. On one hand I was compelled to care for my wife in labour with our first child. On the other hand was my desire to watch Team New Zealand defend the America’s cup. Trust me, balancing the two, while at a hospital is very difficult.
Today that baby girl is 10 and she too is balancing. Only her balance is physical on an imitation Rip-stick. I tried it out tonight. Trust me, balancing on two wheels is very difficult, particularly for an old guy like me.
Yesterday I was speaking to a person who used the term “work-life balance”. It’s a fascinating term. Work-life balance almost implies that you work and then you have a life. Life is far more complex than just work or life. Sports, family, children, finances, churches, work, friends, exercise, relaxing, entertainment, hobbies and the list goes on.
For me there is a continual struggle to balance all of the facets of life. Not just work and everything else. Maybe, we have the wrong term. What if instead of teaching people to have work-life balance, maybe we need to teach people to have “whole-life balance”.
Whole life balance I suspect is harder than balancing a wife in labour and the Americas cup, or an old guy riding a rip-stick.
Whole life balance. Provocative?
You know that experience you have when you first turn the light off and everything goes pitch black. Then slowly, over a period of time, your eyes adjust. This process is called night adaptation. It takes roughly 8 mins to half adapt to darkness and around 30 mins to get full night adaption.
Once our eyes are adjusted. We can walk around with very little light as though it was daylight. We get used to walking around in the dark, and the night feels very bright.
Suddenly someone flashes a bright white light towards our eyes for less than a second. In that second our night adaptation is destroy completely and it will take a further 30 mins to completely restore it. We start fumbling around in the darkness again, wishing it were really daylight.
I took this photo yesterday morning. The bright light is not the sun, it is a street lamp that illuminates small exposed patches in its vicinity, while still casting deep shadows into the darkness. Dawn is breaking in the background. Daylight is coming.
Here’s the point. How bright a light will I be to the people around me? Will I be a bright white light that has significant radical impact? Or will I be like the streetlight, an artificial light that illuminates small patches while leaving deep shadows?
I’ve been thinking lately about how we are all creative. Every single one of us, in some way enjoys creating. Its as if we were created to create. And yet we are all creative in very different ways.
Some people create through art and paintings. Some people create through music and dance. And then other people create through welding or building or software or written words or stories or laughter or process or clothing or teaching or parenting. Why you can even have creative accountants.
And then once we have created. We look at what we created and say “it is good”, and our creation helps create us.
Today’s photo is a part of the Birthday cake, Karina, my very creative wife made for Kyla’s tenth birthday. It is the zero of the ten, and is a banana cake with icing edges and a slightly hollowed centre with blue jelly on top.
Very creative.