The Shovel
I lost a shovel last month which seems a hard thing to do until you lose the shovel and it’s lost and impossible to find. I have no idea what went into the losing of the shovel. We had it. Then we didn’t. I looked everywhere. High and low. It was nowhere to be found. I was perplexed. In the past I would have blamed the kids, and even though my son uses my tools he usually knows where he’s put them. In the case of the shovel, he had no idea where it had gone.
Then yesterday, as I walked into the workroom through the back door, there was the shovel. It was lounging against the wall like a delinquent smoking a cigarette, daring me to ask it where it had been. I simply nodded in recognition and put the shovel inside on a hook where it belonged. I shook my head at my staggering inability to see something that had been obviously standing in plain sight as those days and weeks passed by, and then I wondered if that sort of blindness was caused by something deeper.
What if, deep inside, without consciously acknowledging it, I really believed my son had taken the shovel to work or to a friend's place. So my brain, following that deep set instruction, made my looking only cursory, because I never really expected to find the shovel. And then I thought what if it’s the same with deeply held beliefs in politics and religion. Even when we’re told where to look and what to expect, and there’s data and evidence, our eyes still fail us, because our brain is trained to a different vision. And then I realized how hard it must be for someone with a long held set of beliefs to change and be able to see the shovel by the door.