Something that confuses me is oblivion–when someone just can’t see what’s staring you in the face. Sometimes it’s just annoying to explain something over and over, or cruelly funny when a person is the only one out of the loop. But it is the most frustrating and disheartening for me when this is oblivion to facts, the plight of others, and the narrow margin by which the lucky were so, and the others were not.
But oblivion also leads to a more wondrous concept, and that is the brilliant things that one person sees and another can only appreciate. My brother, for instance, is wildly creative. He looks at a crack in the wall and sees a face, an old man, a scene. I can only draw when instructed and led by the hand, but he is constantly seeing new and amazing things, abstract or concrete, in the whole world around us.
My Andrew, on the other hand, can see in baseball. He hasn’t admitted to it, but I’m fairly convinced. I occasionally keep book for his neighborhood softball league games, something I enjoy but that I don’t yet understand the intricacies of. Meanwhile, Andrew looks at the last inning and knows–no, sees–exactly who did what, even when it’s not notated. It reminds me of that scene in the matrix, when Neo starts to see the world in code.
My father sees in strategy. He can play any card game and win any board game, even newly taught, because his brain is tuned to that frequency. I taught him Cuban dominoes the other night (9-dot) and he beat the pants off my mother and I for a while. Even when the fiches, or tiles, weren’t going his way, he could see the multiple levels of strategies he was just begining to comprehend.
What about you? What can you see that others can’t? What do you wish you could see? Have you noticed the mental advantages and thought processes of those around you?
Away She Goes 