Seeing Through Tired Eyes
Sometimes the problem isn’t what we’re looking at... it’s how we’re looking.
Welcome to Learning to See—a weekly collection of essays exploring the world through faith, science, nature, history, psychology and everyday life. My hope is simple: that together we'll learn to notice the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary.
The first essay in the Learning to See series.
Tonight I was driving home from Perth.
It had been a long day.
One of those days where your eyes feel heavy, your shoulders ache just a little, and all you really want is to get home.
The road stretched out ahead, disappearing towards the horizon.
Then something strange happened.
For a few moments, I became convinced there were two roads.
Not two lanes.
Two completely separate roads.
They seemed to drift apart before slowly coming back together again.
I eased off the accelerator.
Blinking didn’t help.
Only after resting my eyes for a few moments did everything come back into focus.
There had only ever been one road.
Nothing outside the car had changed.
Only my eyes.
That small moment stayed with me.
Because it made me wonder...
How often does this happen in the rest of life?
Not physically.
Emotionally.
Spiritually.
Relationally.
Even intellectually.
Perhaps the greatest danger isn’t that the world changes.
Perhaps it’s that tired eyes quietly convince us it has.
We Rarely Notice Our Own Lenses
Every one of us sees life through something.
Our experiences.
Our upbringing.
Our fears.
Our disappointments.
Our successes.
Our failures.
Our wounds.
Our beliefs.
Our hopes.
The strange thing about lenses is this:
Once we’ve worn them long enough, they become invisible.
We stop seeing through them and simply see with them.
We mistake our perspective for reality.
We assume everyone else sees the world much as we do.
Learning to See Again
The older I get, the more I suspect that wisdom is less about collecting new information...
...and more about seeing familiar things differently.
Sometimes it takes one photograph.
Sometimes one conversation.
Sometimes one book.
Sometimes a child asks a question we’ve never considered.
Sometimes we hear the story of someone whose life is completely different from our own.
Nothing around us changes.
Yet everything changes.
Because we do.
Jesus Was Always Helping People See
One of the things that fascinates me about Jesus is how rarely He simply gave answers.
Instead, He told stories.
He asked questions.
He pointed to seeds.
Birds.
Children.
Farmers.
Coins.
Shepherds.
Vineyards.
He invited people to look again.
Perhaps that’s why the parable of the Good Samaritan was so shocking.
His listeners expected another religious lesson.
Instead, Jesus quietly dismantled their assumptions by making the Samaritan—the person many of them least expected—the hero of the story.
He didn’t simply give people more information.
He gave them a different way of seeing.
We All Get Tired Eyes
Not just after long days.
After painful seasons.
After disappointment.
After grief.
After constant headlines.
After social media.
After conflict.
After success.
After failure.
Tired eyes don’t always see falsely.
But they often see incompletely.
Why I’m Writing This Series
Over the past few years I’ve found myself becoming fascinated by one simple idea.
Learning to see.
To notice.
To wonder.
To pay attention.
This series is an invitation to explore the world through science, nature, psychology, history, art, theology, photography, walking in the hills, and the ordinary moments most of us rush past.
Not because I have all the answers.
But because I’m increasingly convinced that wisdom often begins with paying attention.
The world is full of things we’ve stopped noticing.
Sometimes all it takes is a fresh pair of eyes.
The Invitation
The road hadn’t changed.
My eyes had.
Perhaps that’s true more often than we’d like to admit.
Maybe the first step towards wisdom isn’t looking harder.
It’s looking again.
Look Again
Where in your own life might you be looking through tired eyes?
What assumptions have become so familiar that you’ve stopped noticing they’re there?
What might change if, just for a moment...
...you paused,
looked again,
and learned to see?
Learning to See is a journey of paying closer attention—to the world, to one another, and to God.
Because sometimes the greatest discoveries aren’t new things at all.
They’re familiar things...
finally seen clearly.