The Things We Don’t See

When I started elementary school, I quickly realized my vision wasn’t as sharp as it should be.

Other children could sit at the back of the classroom and still see the board. For me, from that distance, it was nothing but a blurry mess.

If you’re too young to remember chalkboards, they were how we learned back in the day!

Anyway, I didn’t want to tell my parents about my problem because I knew exactly what would happen. They’d take me to the eye doctor, he’d tell me just how bad my vision was, and then he’d make me wear glasses.

As a shy child who wanted nothing more than to blend in, that was a terrifying proposition.

So, I devised a workaround.

Even though it meant sitting directly in the teacher’s line of sight and getting called on more often, I always sat in the front row.

Problem solved.

Or so I thought.

It worked surprisingly well for a while. Then one day, a new teacher introduced an alphabetical seating chart.

My new seat was in the very last row.

I had to figure something out fast, so I began copying from the paper of the student sitting closest to me.

Then it happened.

I was accused of cheating.

Looking back, I suppose I was, in a way. I was a smart kid and knew how to do the work. I wasn’t copying the answers.

I was copying the information.

But I had cheated nonetheless. And I was about to discover just how much I’d been cheating myself all those years.

I came clean to my parents that afternoon, and they did exactly what I’d feared.

They took me to the eye doctor.

He told me exactly what I’d dreaded.

I needed glasses.

A week later, I walked out of his office wearing them.

What I hadn’t counted on was how nothing would ever look quite the same again.

Apparently, I’d never had even halfway decent vision because the world suddenly came alive in a way I couldn’t have imagined.

There were birds in the sky where there used to be only a blanket of blue.

There were individual leaves on the trees where before there had been only a mass of green.

And lo and behold, right in the middle of Main Street, we had a clock tower.

A whole entire clock tower.

Who knew?

What I’d been so afraid to face wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d imagined. And the payoff was leaps and bounds better than I ever could have expected.

I've thought about that experience many times over the years because businesses have a funny way of doing the same thing.

Sometimes we know something isn't quite right.

Cash always feels tighter than it should.

We're working harder, but profits don't seem to reflect it.

A service is selling well, but we're not sure it's actually making money.

We have questions we'd like answered, but part of us is a little afraid of what those answers might be.

So we move closer to the board.

We find a workaround.

We compensate.

And sometimes we get so good at working around a problem that we almost forget it's there.

Almost.

The trouble is, avoiding clarity doesn't change what's actually happening. It only changes how much of it we can see.

And sometimes seeing clearly can be uncomfortable.

The numbers may confirm something we suspected.

They may tell us a price needs to change, an expense needs attention, or something we've been doing for years simply isn't working anymore.

But I've learned that clarity rarely feels as frightening once you have it as uncertainty does while you're avoiding it.

Because once you can see what's really in front of you, you can finally do something about it.

I spent years believing glasses would make my life worse.

Instead, they showed me a world I didn't even know I was missing.

The birds had always been in the sky.

The leaves had always been on the trees.

And apparently, that clock tower had been sitting in the middle of Main Street the whole time.

I just couldn't see any of them.

Maybe that's the thing about clarity.

It doesn't change what's there.

It changes what's possible once you can finally see it.