Seeing and Not Seeing

Over the weekend I was remembering a number of the students we have known in the past decade and a half.  One of them sprang into my mind and made me reflect a bit.

This young man was blind.  He came by regularly and was very organized in his own way.  He had to be.  One day he returned after a lunch program.  He was frantic.  He was looking for a binder.  He asked me if I had seen one laying around.   As a matter of fact, I had not.   Still he was so intense and worried that I joined him in the search.   After a few minutes he asked me, “Are you sure you haven’t seen a binder lying around someplace?”

I asked him if he could tell me the color of the binder.  That way I could remove all extraneous colors and might come closer to finding something that was easily overlooked.

He exploded: “It’s brown.   I am blind!   Everything is brown to me!”

I almost laughed, but I also understood his point.  Color was not a part of his world.  For him it did not exist.   It was an abstract idea as he could grasp it.

As I drove along I began to think about all the ways we are blind because of the things we can not see.   Each of us, given our lives and the things we encounter as well as the things we do not encounter, leave us blind to things that can not reach through our own defenses, our own forms of blindness.

It just might be that we each ought to ask ourselves what it is that we do not see, which others around us see.