Strife has a way of tunneling vision, of creating obscuring shadows, an almost psychedelic effect of distorted reality. In the heat of rage or depth of pain or in an icy lament, the rods and cones constituting a healthy ocular system are transmogrified by variegated temperatures and pressures, creating a mental picture that is not in accord with what is objective reality, to the extent that such a clearly-defined state is not illusory.
From my vantage as counsel and particularly as mediator, I bear witness to these warped observations, often wonder if my client or the warring parties suffer from defective vision or, if not defective, vision deeply misrepresentative of the whole picture. Focusing with raptor-like intensity on one transgression blurs the surrounding scene, allowing large swaths of important visual information to be missed or perhaps willfully ignored. Any detail not in accord with the desired picture is glossed over to create what appears to the holder to be a cogent worldview and what to the rest of the world looks like temporary insanity.
It is this intentional blindness that fascinates me, a coping mechanism of understandable but dubious intention. Most of the people with whom I deal professionally are extremely intelligent and otherwise high-functioning, so I wonder whether their inability to see a differing perspective is caused by a lack of empathy or self-awareness or a bemusing mixture of the two. Incentivized to demonize their opponent, they see microscopic faults in others but somehow fail to recognize the San Andreas running through their own yard.
After a long day fielding harried phone calls and poring through e-mails so meticulously detailed that they have the sheen of a civil engineering project, communications shot to their core with the indignation of aggrievement, I sit and let the kaleidoscopic images swirl around me, disoriented. The inane demands, the petty grievances, the petulant ranting all coagulate into an unpretty Pollock, a bastardized Basquiat, and I feel trapped in a museum of artistic defilement, contemplating that this is the humanity in which I daily wander – a community of people blinded by their own entitlement, riled up at another’s efforts to simply exist.
At my core, deep within the recesses of a brain built on almost 46 years of thoughts and memories, there is an image to which I often return, a grounding, a paradise, a dream. These days, that picture feels both as poignant as ever and unreachable in a way that depresses me. It is an ideal and an idyll and I am not naïve enough to think that I can create in flesh and blood this imaginary masterwork, but I nonetheless believe that it should be easier to create a reasonable facsimile.
I could describe this central photograph to you, but I decline. Its composition is mine alone, its brushstrokes my footsteps, its pixels my labors, it is inviolable and sacred, even as its imagery is not always fixed. It is a refuge, a necessary one as I am just as susceptible to failures of perspective as anyone, so when I gaze inwardly at its tenets, I remember to look around, to see the proverbial forest through the trees, that this is a short and wonderful life that is constantly hijacked by concerns that do not actually matter.
I challenge you to find this bigger picture, to look outside of yourself, to see this world through the eyes of others, to switch your viewpoint to see why those with whom you quarrel are so insistent of your own foibles, just as you find theirs trenchant. I hope that you will prefer this more expansive view of this absolutely breathtaking world.