There’s often more to the story than meets the eye. There’s a great mass underneath the visual tip of an iceberg.
I don’t know for certain when I learned the word, paradox, but it has enlightened my life. So much in life is contradictory. Unless you dig deeper, look further, or exercise your curiosity, the surface will be the sum-total of your life.
“What you see is what you get” is admirable in the sense that one has no hidden agenda, but in another sense, it is a parody. There is always something hidden below the surface.
As the Titanic demonstrated, or any divorced individual will tell you, what you see is not always what you get. That house that you bought, “as is,” isn’t what you thought it was. Straightforward, might be straight and it might go forward, but underneath it all there are unknowns.
After looking in the bathroom mirror recently, I was startled with what I saw for the first time as an asymmetry in my eyes. My right eye socket is smaller than my left.
I immediately shot off a text to my daughter, “why didn’t you tell me I’m a freak of nature? I never noticed that my right eye is smaller than my left eye!” I’ve long known that the universal perception of beauty is based on symmetry. Since I now know that I missed the symmetry-boat, all of my illusions have been dashed.
Years ago, my sister, Dee said, “You so have Dad’s eyes.” I think I was startled by her observation, so I looked closely at my eyes. I hoped to recognize what she saw; Dad’s eyes.
Upon close examination, I discovered something. I’ve never seen my eyes in a mirror! Isn’t that extraordinary and weird?
I’ve worn make-up since I was a teenager, eye makeup included. But, until I had to include my eye color on a driver’s license application back in the day, on which I reported, hazel – I had never seen what color my eyes were.
My grown daughter being my barometer, and my husband oblivious to nuances in color, I asked her what color she thought my eyes are. When she quickly said “green,” I was a tad astonished. Then, I looked closely to my eye balls – focusing as microscopically as possible, only on their pigment, I saw they are quite green.
This endeavor – my search to see my own eye color – brings to mind an incident many years ago when I taught a human sexuality course. I had assigned an exercise to my class, to attribute colors to various developmental stages of their lives.
Some students charted rainbows of nuanced color to represent hiccups and highlights in their development, along with other symbols to describe the stops and starts of their lives. One guy was the exception. Quite troubled, he said, “I don’t know how to do this assignment. My chart is all blue.” He couldn’t conceive of life stages symbolically as color.
He was me, with eye color. I just don’t perceive it. From looking into a mirror at myself, to looking into the eyes of my loved ones – what do I see, if not their color?
Scientists have identified multiple senses beyond the scope of the usual five identified first by Aristotle (sight, smell, hearing, touch, & taste); up to twenty of them, in fact. There is no hard and fast rule and no real consensus among said scientists as to the number of available senses to humans, that cause some of us to perceive another world within the world of the five major senses.
It’s quite possible that I don’t perceive eye color because my perception automatically goes to the thing beneath, behind, or under the eyes, to the essence of life. Everything we see with our eyes, everything visible, is a reflection of something hidden, a symbol or image of something invisible or unseen. “The visible is the invisible written down,” from The Roots of Christian Mysticism.
Not everybody utilizes their capacity of vision, but remain satisfied with their imagination lying dormant, in favor of preoccupation with what’s right in front of their eyes. “Yesterday I inhaled a cloud, and immediately my eyes started raining,” Jared Kintz. Do you have eyes to see?
What are you seeing in the mirror?