Shards of Consciousness

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face

1 Corinthians 13:12

As I've said before, I'm a service coordinator in senior citizen apartments. Often a tenant will come to my office with a request for maintenance in their apartment. Sometimes it is clearly something for our maintenance men to take care of, such as a leaky faucet or the fan in their furnace going bad. Other times it isn't so clear.It's been raining a lot in Western Pennsylvania, the part of the country where I live. Today a tenant came in and said she had three black spots on her wall over her bedroom window. She was afraid water was leaking in the wall.

I went to her apartment so I could see exactly what she was talking about. I went into the bedroom, and looked over the window. I saw three curtain rod brackets that weren't being used, but I didn't see any spots. I told her I couldn't see anything and asked her when she saw them. She told me at night, so I turned on the bedroom light. I then saw three black spots on the wall, just above and to the left of each bracket.

The tenant can't easily get into her bedroom because of being in a wheelchair, so I described the position of the spots to her, and she said those were the spots. I then explained to her that her wall wasn't leaking, and that her light was casting shadows that she was seeing as stains on the wall. She was relieved, and embarassed at the same time.

A lot of our lives are like that. We have a set of beliefs and expectations. These shape what we experience. If we expect to be acted on, we will interpret what happens in our world in those terms. We'll have leaky walls. If we expect to act on the world, though, we'll see that what seemed to be water damage is actually a shadow caused by our own action. It exists, but we have created it, and it isn't so bad because we can change it.

Everything around us is a shadow on the wall. We have shaped it. We can change it.