The Blind man and the Fool

I remember back in college, a bunch of us were sitting around talking about the "what ifs" of life. Someone one asked my buddy, Leon, what if he found out that his girlfriend had been cheating on him while he was off at school. He said, "I would thank her." We all thought he was being silly until he explained his logic. He explained that if she had been cheating on him, then she wasn't what he thought she was and that he would appreciate that she had shown him what he couldn't see. That always stuck with me as profound wisdom. Steven Covey wrote about a similar kind of logic when he talked about paradigm shifts. The idea is that reality is always what it is. Truth cannot change. Our perception of it, however, is what really matters. Perception's change all the time. Something that appears at first to be one thing, turns out to be quite the opposite. Then when you look back on it with clearer vision, you see all those little hints that you chose to ignore or missed all together. The truth was always there. You just couldn't see it.

I find this idea particularly fascinating in relationships. Especially MY relationships. How do things that are so wrong appear to be so right? How do all the signs, which in hind sight will undoubtedly point to inevitable disaster, somehow seem to point to romantic bliss at the onset of things? And how is it that these signs are so often perfectly clear to everyone but the one that needs them most?

They say that love is blind. I suppose that makes sense. Love clouds the vision and makes the wise man into a fool. But as a wise man once told me, the only difference between a genius and a fool is time. If when you close your eyes and leap, you fall into happiness, that foolish jump will look awful smart. But if you're not so lucky, that same decision looks like a fool's errand. The problem is, only time can tell that tale.

One of these days time is gonna call me the genius and not the fool. Until then, I'm still blind jumping. Look out below.