Heroes Not Zombies

When you look closely at a water droplet you can see that it acts as a kind of lens. You can see the world around the drop reflected in the water. But it’s upside down. Just like you’d see inside the old kind of camera which cast the image of whatever the lens was paying attention to, onto the film at the back, and/or, onto the viewfinder.

The first camera I ever had was a box camera. You held the camera at waist height, flipped up the lid and looked at the image lying on the horizontal glass plate underneath. I think it used a prism to flip the image around so that you could see it “the right way up” in the viewfinder. We don’t even think about that with our modern digital cameras which process the image before we even get to see it.

I think it makes you stop and think when you see an upside down image like this. It literally makes you look at the world differently. And we need to do that sometimes to actually see and understand what is around us. For most of our days we sail along not really noticing most of what our senses pick up. In some sense we only notice what we pay attention to, and we only pay attention to what we notice. This relationship between noticing and paying attention is curious, partly because we can make a choice and attach our attention to whatever we choose….we can choose to become more aware of a scent, a particular colour, a shape or a texture. In fact, it’s a pretty great way to live more in the present, isn’t it……to pay attention to what our senses are sensing?

But it can happen the other way around – our attention can be “caught”. Something which moves suddenly, something which changes, like a loud noise, or a change in temperature, a darkening or lightening of the room as clouds pass over the sun…… Or it can be caught by something “odd”, something “unfamiliar”, something “unexpected”.

I think these upside down images are a bit like that. We aren’t used to seeing the world upside down, so we notice it when it happens, and that noticing “grabs” our attention, and leads to a natural exploration.

There’s a Tarot card called “The Hanged Man”, which I think about when I see an upside down image in a lens like this. I’m no Tarot expert, but I think there’s something about that card which is about changing our perspective, about looking at the world differently, in order to understand it better.

We have to do that from time to time if we want to understand reality. We have to change our perspective, look from a different angle. Other people can be the trigger to doing that….but only if we encourage and are genuinely interested in other peoples’ views.

Getting stuck in social media echo chambers, or trapped in the manipulated information of advertisers and politicians happens all the time. That’s why it can be helpful, though not always comfortable, to try to understand the world view of people who don’t see things the same way we do. It’s not a question of who is right and who is wrong. It’s a question of reaching a fuller, deeper understanding of other people, and of the world.