It's all in the training.

Comments notwithstanding, I may have been in the States for over a week but I haven't been in MY state until just a couple of days ago. I got home from London, had three days to regroup, then skipped town again for business. It's nice to finally be home for awhile!

But it's a good thing for this blog that I had to spend some time in the mid-parts of this great country o' ours because "a funny thing happened on the way to the forum" and I suddenly had great content for Tessellations at hand.

I was doing a series of speaking engagements over the weekend, traveling from one event to another through two states. I had no sooner gotten off the plane than my host and chauffeur for the weekend whisked me off to the first engagement, a two hour drive away. Still high on Dramamine and my head spinning from trying to figure out where I was and what I was doing, we parked near the door of the church where the first event was being held and unloaded our technical equipment to run PowerPoint for my first presentation. We slung a variety of computers, projectors, and other bags over our shoulders and power-walked through wind and spattering rain into the church, entering via the social hall, quickly conferring about schedules and how to organize ourselves for set-up and presentation. I was no further than two steps into the social hall when my eyes immediately landed on a gorgeous quilt folded over the back of a bench on the far end of the room.

"Oooh!" I interrupted whatever I'd originally been saying, "Look at that beautiful quilt!"

My friend/host spun her head from side to side..."What quilt?"

"That one right there," I responded with a quick bob of the head in the appropriate direction, my arms too full with equipment to be able to point. She continued to look around even as I began to make my way to the quilt, equipment burdens and schedules momentarily forgotten.

"What quilt?" She asked again, her voice sounding bemused and, admittedly, maybe even a little frustrated with my distraction. She watched where I was going and finally saw it. "Oh, that quilt," she said, somewhat dismissively as she returned her concentration instead on finding the person organizing the event. Her tone of voice recalled me to what I was there to do and I turned in my tracks, heading back in the direction of the sanctuary as the leaders of the event, having spied our entrance to the building, began introducing us as the speakers.

The quilt was forgotten as my friend and I rushed to get flash drives and computers and projectors talking to one another (unsuccessfully, as it turned out). But an hour later when our presentation was finished and we returned to the social hall to pack up our equipment and say our farewells to the participants in the event, I finally had the opportunity to check out the quilt. Another woman noticed my interest and my curiosity was finally assuaged as we chatted for a few minutes about the pattern and quilting and the story behind the quilt (Log Cabin, machine quilted, done for a celebration of some sort in the church).

After we left, beginning another two hour journey to our next destination, my friend and I joked about how I'd visually locked in on that quilt the second I'd entered the room whereas she hadn't been able to see it until I had actually pointed it out to her. It wasn't until I was back on the plane for my return trip home several days later, however, that I thought about what that small incident pointed out.

We see what we're trained to see.

Because I spend so much time and energy engaged in quilting, I have essentially trained myself to notice quilts, quilt patterns, even color combinations or geometric designs that somehow relate to quilting, everywhere I go. It's no surprise, then, that the first thing I notice when I walk into a room is the presence of a quilt. Equally telling, my friend who isn't a quilter didn't notice it until it was especially pointed out to her. She may have eventually seen it, of course, but it still wouldn't stand out for her the way it did for me. Her reaction points out the opposite truth to this statement:

We don't see what we're not trained to see. Or the corollary statement, we don't see what we don't want to see.

How appropriate a realization this was to me as I was flying home from my weekend spent making a series of presentations on the topic of sex trafficking. This global scourge is something that happens in every country including the U.S., but is something that the vast majority of us don't want to think about and may even simply refuse to see. "That's something that happens over there," we might say, "or in cities," if we live in a rural area. Just a few days before I traveled to make these presentations, however, a series of newspaper articles was printed in one of their local papers about police having broken up a sex trafficking ring active in small towns through the eastern part of the state. It listed the small towns the traffickers had set up brothels in, and several women present at some of those speaking engagements lived in or near those small towns. Some of those small towns only had a few hundred residents, and the photos of the "brothels" showed that they were just regular homes on regular streets, near gas stations and sometimes even churches. Houses that any of us would walk by several times a day and not think twice about what was happening inside. People reading those articles, and those present at my speaking engagements, now had to see what they hadn't been trained to see. They had to realize that yes, trafficking even happens in Small Town America.

The moral of the story is that we see what we want to see--which means that sometimes we have to train ourselves to see certain kinds of things. I still don't want to see evidence of human trafficking, but I've had to train myself to see it. But more ever-present than the big global issues like that is the day-to-day "vision" we have. I have worked with teens for over twenty years, and the old maxim is true--you often get the behavior you expect to get. In other words, if I look at a kid and see a troublemaker, I'll have a troublemaker on my hands. But if I look at the same kid and see a basically good kid that occasionally messes up, I'll be working with a basically good kid. Or if I see a kid that has real attitude but that attitude indicates a traumatic childhood or a dysfunctional home or difficult relationship issues at school...then I can work to break through the attitude to get to the heart of the matter. And stepping the topic down even more, if I look at a rude waitress or store clerk and see only the rudeness, I may react rudely myself. But if I see a harried person who's had a difficult day or is stressed over things at home or any other number of reasons behind the rudeness, I would be more likely to react with patience and understanding and alleviate any possible difficulties with the rest of the conversation.

I'm working on training my eyes to see things differently. What do you see?