We’ve all heard the question, “Is the glass half empty or half full?” And the statement that generally goes along with it: See it as half full. Look at the pluses instead of the minuses. Look at what’s right and not at what’s wrong, what you have instead of what you don’t have.
All of that’s fine, but wait a minute—in actuality the glass is one hundred percent full. There’s no such thing as an empty glass, or a partly filled glass. It may be full of air, or water, or lemonade, but it’s full. Once we realize this, we have a lot of choices, and there are a lot of questions we can ask. We don’t have to assume that the plusses and minuses are the way we think they are. We don’t necessarily have to evaluate at all. We can investigate our preconceptions, our evaluations, more closely. We can ask, what is it full of, right now? What’s actually there, what’s really inside that glass, not leaving anything out, not assuming we already know?
What if we just accept it all, just for the time being, and take an interest in looking at it more closely? Tasting it more deeply? Just for now. Not analyzing—just looking, just tasting. No opinions, no conclusions, not yet. Just observing. Like someone who really doesn’t know what’s inside. Like a child seeing it for the first time.
I don’t know what we might want to do when we actually see that the glass is always one hundred percent full, but I do know that looking is different from judging, that observing from a place of of ‘let’s see,” is different from jumping to conclusions. That sometimes what seems to be wrong has within it something of great value, and that sometimes what seems to be lacking turns out to be the presence of another quality that has been overlooked—a quality of depth and infinite possibility. It is like the foreground and the background of an image. The background may be more significant than the narrower focus on what’s in the foreground. There may be all sorts of things in the field of our vision that we’ve never noticed before. In seeing the background, the wider field of vision, things can look and feel very different. And the very act of relaxing our focus, widening our gaze and letting in whatever’s there, can change the quality of our life.
Our lives are neither half empty nor half full. Our lives are one hundred percent full—every moment, every breath, every thought, every feeling. And it’s not only one hundred percent full, but it’s full way beyond what we see at first glance. The more we look, the more we see.
The more we open our gaze and soften, the more space there is in us for things to settle and find a truer proportion in the scheme of things. As we relax our gaze, the more we allow in, and the deeper and broader our field of vision becomes. We can relax even more. We can let in even more. And no matter how much we look, there is always more, with nuances and implications that extend far further than we ever realized.
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Poetry asks permission
to tear your wall down
brick by brick
La poesia te pide permiso
para demontar tu muro
ladrillo a ladrillo
Excerpt from Lobeznos (Wolf Cubs)
by José María Zonta
Translation by Carlos Reyes,
from Poems of Love & Madness
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