You know those perceptual illusions where you think you see one thing, but if you look more closely, you can see something else? In one moment you perceive a goblet, and in another, you see two human profiles? Or, to borrow the image of kintsugi from part one of this blog, in one moment you see broken ceramics. Look again through different eyes and you see a beautiful gilded bowl. We might all do well to cultivate access to such a perceptual shift when perceiving the present state of the world. We can readily see the divisiveness, but then, as the world first did when Neil Armstrong took a giant leap for humankind, we can marvel at the view of the earth from the moon, seeing a breathtakingly beautiful blue-green floating globe. We can mourn the pain and seemingly endless conflict around us, and then we can remember Helen Keller’s words, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” For as long as there have been examples of divisiveness, there have been instances of the overcoming and healing of it.
