Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see. – Mom
I can’t count how many times I heard this when I was growing up. I’m sure it was my Mother’s way to stop my agonizing, and probably some of my whining, about all the drama at school. But I don’t think she realized what sage advice she was giving me. Of course at the time I wasn’t interested in hearing it, but after all these years I find these words have stayed with me and they still apply. It seems Mom knew what she was talking about after all. This saying was meant to be a thoughtful pause, a reminder that I didn’t know the full story, and to stop and think instead of just reacting until I did. We can be sure that it’s not very often we fully understand the situation for what it really is, we misinterpret what we see and hear, and then get caught up in all the stories we tell ourselves. For the most part we only know what we perceive of others, no matter how close we are to them. And for those we don’t know that well, snippets of their conversations, and watching their actions from a distance, doesn’t tell us a thing about what’s really going on.
It’s easy to get caught up in concocting all kinds of crazy stories, we do it by ignoring the most pertinent facts. If we really think about it, almost everything we know is a partial truth. Fragments of information and misunderstandings undermine our peace of mind and end up being only a distortion of what is actually happening. We fill in the blanks with our overactive imaginations and are almost always wrong. All we’re doing is wasting a lot of time and energy on thinking in circles and working ourselves up. Why do we care so much about what others are doing or saying, and what does it keep us distracted from? Ourselves. I like to call this a medicine cabinet proverb because it can heal any number of situations, including the relationship we have with our self. Just as we have a hard time seeing and truly understanding another it can often be difficult to clearly see our self and our own motivations. We could say these same words to our self and it would help mitigate how harshly we judge our own actions, offering us an opportunity to turn inward for the answers we try to find in the outside chaos.
In the end what we see and hear in the world has very little to do with the reality of what is going on. This saying advises us to mind our own business. All that time spent worrying about what others are doing can now be spent on our own lives, concentrating on what we want. It’s a huge relief to be able to whittle down all the unnecessary turmoil and upset. Then we are free to focus on what matters, instead of being caught by a million diversions that don’t have anything to do with what’s really going on anyway.
Nothing is as it seems. But if we learn to focus on our own heart we’ll be shown the truth.
Happy Birthday Mom, and thanks for the reminder!
kb
