There are always clues

When my younger daughter was in middle school I was invited to give a couple of workshops on composition, and this (or the base image of this) was one of the images I brought in as an example.  I had taken it in Hawaii; we had just landed after a long flight, we were all exhausted, and my younger daughter went to the window to look at the pool, pulling aside the curtain.

The light was lovely, so I pulled out my camera, and this was the result.  What I had not expected, however, taking this in to illustrate the workshop, was that the boys in the classroom immediately assumed this was a nude woman in a shower.  I knew she was clothed, and knew the circumstances, but they saw what they were programmed by their hormones to see, and I had to immediately put it away to stifle all the titters and giggles.

... which is, I think, another reminder that what we see is always colored by what we expect to see: those same assumptions I spoke of yesterday; the ones that keep us boxed in, and limit our perceptions of possibility -- assumptions that can both limit our ability to find our way out of difficult situations (or find a way to appreciate such situations or learn from them) and, taken to their extremes, can result in activities like racial profiling and war.

It's all well and good to suggest that we are trapped by our assumptions.  But how can we escape that trap?  I'm beginning to think that mindfulness and presence may be the only workable answer.  If I am fully present to what is happening right here, right now, then I am not overlaying either past experiences or future hopes and worries on the picture before me; on my sense impressions right here, in this moment.

And if I do that, stay right here with it, I can see that though her arms are bare, the young woman's body is too masked for me to assume clothing or no clothing -- and, more importantly, there is WAY too much light in the picture for it to have been taken in a shower -- unless, of course, the shower has in it a very large window... Also, the hair is clearly not wet; it's too fluffy.

So there are clues.  There are always clues.  Sometimes they take the form of coincidences, sometimes they are just delicate impressions, fleeting glimpses... But if we pay attention, right here, in this moment, I am beginning to suspect that everything we need to know is there for us.