We Can't See Until We Can
We tend to look for the answers we want. Sometimes the answer is much bigger than the question.
Elizabeth Mapes
8/14/20263 min read
Helping people shift their perspective is part of what I do.
As my intuition has opened over the years, my vision has changed with it. Symbolism appears everywhere now, and I often see a much larger landscape surrounding whatever is happening on the surface. Sometimes someone’s life purpose shows up clearly, but there are experiences they may still need to move through before they can recognize it for themselves.
From personal experience, I know we cannot see something until we’re ready to see it.
We can’t see until we can.
This is the most frustrating part of my work. No matter how clearly I can see the expanse of a situation, I cannot make someone else see beyond the speck on which they’re focused.
A client recently asked whether an artist she had a crush on was interested in her. When I looked at the energy, I saw something entirely different—the budding potential for new life. She was an artist too, though she hadn’t touched her paints in years. Something about this man was stirring that part of her awake again.
I felt he was a catalyst, not a destination. Still, she wanted certainty about him. She couldn’t hear what I was trying to show her.
She was looking at the speck. I was seeing the expanse.
Clients are always reflecting something, so, of course, I had to turn the mirror back on myself.
There is a peripheral relationship in my own life that I have spent a great deal of time trying to understand. What does this connection mean? Why does it keep resurfacing? Why am I so drawn toward someone when the circumstances make so little sense? Why invest so much emotional energy in something that gives so little back?
I examined everything — conversations, dreams, synchronicities, intuition, attraction, distance, timing. I saw a soul tried by fire, weary and strong. I sensed that our connection was a necessary path of growth for us both, and that without each other, neither of us could reach the next level. At times, I felt I could see a larger arc surrounding his life and my place within it, as though my role was to sound a call in the only form he might hear.
But whether he hears it, what he sees, and what he chooses belong to him. And somewhere in all my looking at his expanse, I had been neglecting my own.
This morning, I finally saw it.
I have been staring at the man.
He is my speck.
I was so focused on understanding the relationship—what it was, what it wasn’t, what it might become—that I almost missed the enormous landscape surrounding it.
He awakened fun in me. Excitement. Desire. He reminded me how much I love connecting with wide circles of people and, most importantly, how much I love to play.
When we met, I was coming out of a very difficult period in my life. I, too, had been tested by fire. I was weary and needed to find my strength. Through our connection, I began to find it.
There was chemistry and a profound emotional connection. But instead of holding him as the object of my desire, I can hold everything the relationship awakened in me as information about what I would want in a future relationship, if one ever comes.
Now I can ask different questions. Who have I become because of this? What have I been forced to confront? What have I learned about trust, attachment, willingness, control, longing, boundaries, honesty, surrender, what I need to feel safe, and my own capacity to love?
What if the significance of the relationship wasn’t contained in the relationship at all?
That final question changed the view. The man hasn’t disappeared. He’s simply more appropriately sized within the picture.
The speck was real. It just wasn’t the whole expanse.
Details of the client’s story have been changed to protect privacy.