If It Was a Snake, It Would've Bitten Me

This has been a year of losing things.

I lost my favorite sterling silver hoop earring.
I lost my gold bead necklace.

And devastatingly, I lost the bracelet my great-grandmother had pinned to her skirts in 1905 when she came over from Sicily.

I suppose it’s been a year of losing jewelry - something I’ve been chalking up to either carelessness, exhaustion, or, on days when I’m really feeling off my game, early onset dementia.

This morning I lost my Apple watch.

I hadn’t left the house so I knew it wasn’t really lost, it just wasn’t on the charger where I religiously place it every night. “Watch…football,” I say as I take it off to remind myself to take the tiny football shaped progesterone capsule that’s helping me stay sane (and cool).

Only this morning when I went to put it on…no watch.

I searched for about a half an hour before I remembered that I could get it to ping and tell me its location.

It was on the nightstand, about 3 inches from the charger.

This felt significant because last week I found the sterling silver hoop in my jewelry box, where I had looked for it about a thousand times.

Just days before, I found my gold bead necklace - the one I was convinced I'd lost in Sint Maarten, where I'd last worn it. Which means I looked for it there, packed it, unpacked it, and still managed to miss it entirely. Okay, yes, it was tangled around another necklace I sometimes wear it with. But still…

I’m an eagle eye searcher.
I’m the guy that everyone comes to when they can’t find something.
Why am I suddenly unable to find my own stuff?

It honestly made me wonder what else I may have been missing.

And this is something I know a bit about. Science suggests that “plain sight” is not as straightforward as it sounds.

Your eyes take in far more information than your conscious mind can process. Seeing is not the same thing as visually registering something. And visually registering something is not the same thing as recognizing its relevance.

Your brain is not a camera faithfully recording everything in front of it. It is closer to an overworked editor, deciding in real time what deserves to make it into the story.

Your brain is filtering reality and feeding you a custom version - every second of every day.

There are a number of ways it does this:

• It filters for what it’s told to focus on. If you’re focusing on counting basketball passes (an actual study) and a guy in a gorilla suit walks across the court, you’re unlikely to notice him.

• It filters for what it expects to find (and where it expects to find it). If your watch is always on the charger your brain may filter out everything around the charger and not see it sitting 3 inches away.

• It filters for what the subconscious mind, through repeated exposure, deems important. This is the tricky one. Your subconscious filters for what your inner world believes is true. Your brain has been listening to every thought you've had, every story you've told yourself about who you are and what's possible for you. And it takes all of that literally. So you may be telling yourself - and everyone around you - that you're open and ready, but if the deeper current is about protecting yourself from failure, shame, or the particular pain of not being enough, your brain will oblige.

This has some serious implications and not just about where your keys and glasses are.

Because we don’t only search for objects, do we?

We search for answers.
For possibilities.
For the thing that will help us finally make the change we need to make.

We search for the opportunity that will shift the trajectory of our work.
The conversation that will clarify what comes next.
The high-leverage move that will keep us moving forward without having to work so damn hard.

And when we don’t see them, we assume that they’re not there.
That they don’t exist.
Or that they don’t exist for us.

But maybe it’s the filter that’s really in the way.

Sometimes we’re so focused on what we think the answer should look like that we can’t recognize it in another form.

Sometimes we’re only searching in places where we’ve found answers before.

Sometimes the protective parts of us are scanning so carefully for the possibility of failure, rejection, or embarrassment that they fail to register the possibility of anything else at all.

And sometimes…we’re just plain tired. (Which, unfortunately, impacts your filter too.)

That doesn’t mean that every answer is just sitting on your nightstand waiting for you to get your shit together and notice it.

But it does mean that when you feel you’ve tried everything - searched everywhere - it may be worth questioning the reliability of the search itself.

For me that means asking questions like…

What have I already decided the answer is supposed to look like?

Where have I stopped looking because experience has taught me not to expect anything useful there?

What might become visible if I stop trying harder and allow my eyes to soften for a minute?

The bracelet hasn’t turned up yet.
But at this point, I’m not entirely convinced it is lost.
There is every possibility it is sitting somewhere, in plain sight, patiently waiting for me to become capable of seeing it.

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If any of this landed for you, it might be worth knowing that this is exactly the kind of thing we work with inside Liminal.

Not fixing your filter. Learning to see around it.

Join us here.