I.30 — Honest Seeing

There is a kind of looking that only looks at what is flattering, and it is not looking at all. It is curating, choosing which parts of the view get admitted and which get quietly turned away at the door.

The unflattering motive behind a generous-looking act. The small meanness on an otherwise kind day. The satisfaction taken, just for a second, in someone else's trouble. These are ordinary, common to nearly everyone, and two habits keep them from being seen honestly. One is flinching away the moment they appear, changing the subject inside one's own head before the look completes. The other is the opposite and just as evasive: seizing on them and dwelling, turning a small honest fact into a long stretch of guilt that feels serious but is really another way of not looking at the thing itself, only at feelings about the thing.

Both are forms of not-looking dressed to resemble their opposite.

What gets seen plainly, without flinching and without the dwelling, can actually be worked with, understood, sometimes changed, at least known. What stays hidden does not go away. It runs the house from the basement, deciding things nobody upstairs agreed to. Try, once, looking straight at one small unflattering thing today, and stopping there, at the seeing.