April 15
The healthy eye must be able to see everything visible and must not say: I want only green things — for that is the gaze of the sick. The healthy mind must be ready for everything that happens.
Meditations X.35 (freely rendered)
Listening mode
The healthy eye must be able to see everything visible and must not say: I want only green things — for that is the gaze of the sick. The healthy mind must be ready for everything that happens.
What you don't want to see is often not the unpleasant at all, but the unexpected. If you decided long ago that someone is difficult, you notice every curt reply and every late call back. That he recently put something aside for you without mentioning it slips through. It doesn't fit the picture, so it barely counts.
And yet you can't help selecting. Your attention is limited. Anyone who takes in everything at once ends up seeing nothing clearly. A gaze without any selection would not be healthy, but overwhelmed.
Perhaps the difference lies elsewhere: not in whether you filter, but in whether your filter can still be surprised. Whether an observation that doesn't fit is at least allowed to knock before you file it away as an exception.
This is more uncomfortable than it sounds. A fixed judgement saves energy and protects you from disappointment, because you already know what's coming. It also spares you the stranger effort of getting to know someone all over again.
In your next conversation he answers curtly again. At the end he asks how things went with that matter from last week.
