Seeing the Whole Picture  

I sat on our deck last night surrounded by tall pines, maples and oaks, listening to crickets and katydids, appreciating the shapes, shadows, and sounds around me.  

Then someone across the lake turned on a very bright spotlight that shone through the trees into my face, and suddenly that was all I could see, all I could think about.  

“Why would anyone use such a bright light up here?  Why are they disturbing this peace? Whose house is that?  They can’t really be “lake people” like us.  Why don’t they turn it out. Can’t someone talk to them and explain that you don’t need that kind of light up here? If I had a bebe gun maybe I could shoot it out.”  

On and on my thoughts went, forgetting about the peace and beauty of the trees, the shapes and shadows and sounds around me.  My eyes and my thoughts were drawn to that single bright light.  

Then it dawned on me how easily we can be blinded by a single light — or a single issue.  How often does a single issue blind us to the full picture of the world around us.  How often does focusing on one single issue blind us to other equally important issues.  

And how often does the media - newspapers, magazines, TV and even social media - focus so hard on one particular issue, or part of an issue, that we are blinded and unable to see the whole picture?

Last night I discovered that if I moved just a bit to the right or left, the trees covered the direct beam of light allowing me to see the whole of my world again.  The light was still there, but only as part of the whole.  

So now I’m thinking, maybe we should all be careful not to let one single issue, no matter how important it may be, blind us to all the colors, the shapes, the darks and the lights of this world in which we live.