Day 643: Unseeing

Right before I started writing this post, my boyfriend Michael and I had a conversation that went all over the place, including

• different reactions to my 16-year-old son getting his wisdom teeth out yesterday,
• feelings and thoughts about recent “trivial” changes in our lives (like the paint trim on our building and a new format for a magazine I’ve subscribed to for decades),
• possible reasons why our cat Harley, who lived with other people before us, is so oddly skittish in certain situations,
• how I don’t do puzzles or read novels as I used to — before I changed careers and became a psychotherapist — possibly because my work now includes “solving” puzzles and hearing stories all the time, and
• things we wish we could “unsee” (e.g., a disturbing medical x-ray, violence, death, etc).

Are there things that you’ve seen, that you wish you could unsee?  Or, for that matter, are there things you’ve heard that you wish you could unhear?

Hmmm. I’m surprised to see the turn this post is taking.

Why? Because I seem to be unseeing and unhearing acceptance, right now.

Can you see (or hear) what I mean by that?

Acceptance means acknowledging what’s been seen, heard, and otherwise experienced in the past. It doesn’t necessarily mean liking those things — it’s just acknowledging the reality of where we’ve been and where we are … allowing ourselves to be more fully in the moment and to open ourselves up to the possibilities ahead.

So …. am I unseeing the concept of acceptance here, by focusing on what we might wish we could unsee or unhear?

What do you think?

Just now, I was unseeing Oscar, who is always with me when I write these posts:

I was glad to un-un-see him, in the moment.

Sometimes, we can re-see things. Is that similar to unseeing?

For example, I used this photo in my post yesterday:

When I saw that sign at work on Friday, I saw that as “hope” and immediately took a picture of it.

After I published the post yesterday, I re-saw that sign, like so:

Where I work, people use signs on the door to signal whether it’s okay to enter. That’s an awfully short “h” in that word. Could that sign have actually said  … “nope”? Is the other side of that sign …. “yep”?

If I can remember where I saw that sign at work, I’ll see if I can see the unseen side of it when I return.

Here are some more images I’ve recently seen, unseen by you (until now):

  

Now that you’ve seen all this, can you unsee any of it? Would you want to?

Here’s something you can choose to hear or not hear — a song by Johnny Nash I’ve used here before (but in a different version):

(See here for the YouTube video of Johnny Nash singing “I Can See Clearly Now” on a 1970’s Midnight Special)

Thanks to all — including you! — for seeing and hearing what was here, today.