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Just because you don’t see the road you can’t assume the road is not there

A few years ago, driving back home on a local road, a truck traveling in the same direction caused such a splash that my windshield was filled with mud, preventing me from seeing the road. The incident was resolved immediately. Nothing bad happended. But those few seconds seemed longer than they really were.

Why this temporal distortion? Because of the “anguish” (so to speak) of not seeing the road, and, at the same time, knowing that I had to continue traveling along that road. And among everything I thought at that time (how to quickly clean the windshield, what to do to keep my lane, how to avoid a new splash), there was something I didn't think: that the road no longer existed.

In other words: it’s absurd to think that just because I can’t see the road (because of the mud attached to the windshield), the road no longer exists. But, if we are honest, that is exactly what we do in the way of life. When we no longer see the road, for whatever circumstances, we believe that road no longer exists.

But why was the mud against the windshield problematic? Because, as is obvious, the windshield is made to look through the windshield, and not to look at the windshield. In other words, if the windshield becomes present (because it’s dirty), then we are in trouble: we no longer see beyond that glass.

The same thing happens, so to speak, with our ideas, beliefs, creeds, and opinions. Most of the time we don't pay attention to them. We don’t see them. In fact, we see reality through our ideas, but we don't see the ideas themselves. But if life muds our journey, those ideas become opaque, become visible and we need to "clean" them to see our path.

However, in many cases (perhaps in most cases), we do precisely the opposite: we cling to "muddy", opaque, closed ideas, beliefs, creeds and opinions. And we say and proclaim that if we do not see the path, that path doesn’t exist.

Because we don't see beyond the windshield of our ideas, our world is reduced. And a reduced world forces us to close our mind, our heart and our will. And then the world is reduced even more, and the cycle repeats itself with smaller and smaller worlds.

When that situation becomes intolerable (and sooner or later it will happen), instead of cleaning the windshield, instead of cleaning the ideas, we adopt a very dangerous attitude, that of self-deception. Not only do we believe that we are right, and others are not, but we also believe that we know more than others and that we are smarter than others.

At that moment, the downward spiral intensifies and then we begin to look for guilty people and scapegoats. Our contribution to the social field of negativity is intensified and, even worse, we infect others with the disease of self-deception, thus increasing the social negativity. 

Meanwhile, life’s way goes inexorably on.

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