Everyone Deserves to Make A sound

​If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, did that falling tree make a sound?

For the longest time I would have answered, of course it did!

But actually, the truth is, it did not.

When the tree fell it created vibrations in the air. For those vibrations to be sound, someone needed to be within reach of those waves to trigger mechanisms in the ear and then the brain that would have identified those waves as a familiar sound.

Otherwise, there were simply waves in the air.

Additionally, someone would have to receive those waves who has actually experienced a tree falling in the woods to have some sort of memory stored that would make sense of those waves as the sound of a falling tree.

According to Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, making sense of the world is always a combination of something happening out there AND some experience in our head that helps us make sense of that something. Without something inside our head to make sense of that something out there - a memory of a past experience that looks or sounds or smells or tastes or feels like that something - Dr. Barrett says we suffer from experiential blindness.

It has me reflecting this morning on just how much 'experiential blindness' impacts our relationships with one another. How much it impacts our opportunities to bring healing and support to one another.

I am working with a group this week to equip them to prevent the abuse and misuse of alcohol and drugs in their communities. And one of the most helpful things I think I bring to that conversation is helping them understand we will never be fully helpful in preventing or healing behavioral patterns if we don't fully understand the experiences people have beneath them.

Many folks working in my field have no blindness to the health risks of using various substances. But many of us are completely blind to the experiences people have had that contributed to them using those substances.

Without our eyes wide open to what people have been through, we will always be blind to many of the chances we have to help them.

I'm afraid we often want to remain experientially blind to others' experiences. It's much easier to judge people than it is to get familiar with them and understand them and actually have some empathy and compassion for choices or lifestyles we find offensive or even deplorable.

Judgment, if you think about it, really takes very little time and energy.

Understanding, however, can often require intense curiosity and exploration. It requires an open-mindedness that considers the possibility that knowing what one has experienced might not change my mind about one's choices, but it might open my heart to being more loving of them in spite of those choices.

It might also open the door to learning that before I can reshape someone's choices, I need to show them my heart feels for the things they've experienced and have shaped their life.

Some blindness is difficult to cure.

Some impossible.

But experiential blindness, that is absolutely curable. At least when it comes to the blindness we have to each others' experiences. It simply requires us to care to know. Care to know what others have experienced before they became this person we know today.

Because the reality is, without experiential awareness, we really don't know anyone at all.

And sadly, without experiential awareness, people are often left feeling like a tree that fell in the woods that made no sound.

Everyone deserves to make a sound.