Look again!

 

    Over the last several months, I've been playing the game "Word Crossy" on my phone. The screen shot above probably says as much about how the game should be played as any narrative. But, basically, I need to string the letters together to fill the various rows/columns in the "cross-word" puzzle, without any clues.  Sometimes I can speed right through the game. Other times I can barely start. There aresome "helps" provided. Tapping the light bulb in the lower right will charge your "bank" 50 points (of the 278 in the lower left) and fill in one letter in the puzzle; often that's enough to spur thinking. Or, the little double-crossed arrows in the lower left corner will re-juggle the letters in the circle; the supposition is that seeing things differently will also spur thinking.
     There have been plenty of times when I've used up my points, and juggling the letters just doesn't work. So, in frustration (why doI keep playing this game!?), I leave the app and check my mail, or the weather, or Facebook. Or I just shut the phone down and go clean the bathroom. Then, more often than not, when I return to the game, I solve it within seconds. The letters hadn't changed; I simply quit staring at them for a while. Clearly, the same phenomenon is part of the fascination with some optical illusions. You can look at the patterns of colors or shapes and only see oneimage. Come back to the picture later, and, all of a sudden you can't believe you didn't see the otherone!
       I've found something similar in a "non-visual" arena. Starting last year (2017), I decided that I would read another tradition's sacred text over the course of the year. In 2017, it was the Quran; this year is the Bhagavad Gita. Some of this comes from my innate curiosity. I just want to know what the text reallysays (rather than relying on snippets, sound-bites or proof-texts); and, I want to read it appreciatively. When I find something I don't understand, I can easily turn to a knowledgable-in-that-tradition friend. But another reason I've been doing this is that I find places of convergence between the other tradition and my own. And, often enough, my understanding of my own tradition is deepened or altered in a way that wouldn't have happened had I spent all my time in my own texts. I've very much come to value this addition to my spiritual practice.
      There's something here that points, too, to one of our society's besetting problems these days. Whether its our choice of multiple broadcast news outlets or which online news sources we "follow", we have such a tendency to fall into tribalism. "Echo-chamber" is the phrase often bandied about. Getting out and hearing a different voice is becoming increasingly foreign. And, I believe, we are all the lesser for it.
      Yesterday, I led a workshop on Appreciative Inquiry for one of DU's divisions. Part of the workshop had the attendees pair up and interview each other on a series of questions. At the end, when I asked "How was the process for you?", one participant said that he had been paired with someone in a different unit within the division, someone he didn't know well. And then he commented on how valuable that was, as opposed to being with someone from his own unit whose answers he probably already knew.
      It's so often time to shut the app down, do something else, read something else, talk to someone else, and then come look again.

Namasté,

Gary