Seeing new

Seeing new  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD
Dec 2011

  
     I’ve been travelling by sea around New Zealand getting daily intense glimpses of various places in South and North Islands. It’s reminded me of ecology excursions that I used to go on when I was at school where we threw small quadrants onto the ground as we walked and noted, in great detail, the minutii of plants, soil types, rocks, and insects of each falling of the quadrant. 
 

       I loved these excursions and loved what I found: the excitement of seeing the variety and interconnectedness of each element in each microworld.  This recent travelling has felt similar to me. Here we were hopping from place to place, getting a sort of anthropological view of things without much engagement in the daily happenings of the places – yet aware that our presence essentially changed things for the people and the places. Tourism injects big bucks to local economies, and the people – coming and being there - get a chance to share old things with new people. It was fun connecting to others in this way. Our footsteps up hillsides contributed also to the wear-tear of pathways and the ripples from our ship shaped shore lines as only ripples can.

      As I mull on these things, two other parts come to mind. Each new day of life is like an extract in the process of becoming life. And a therapeutic session is also in the process of becoming, and yet also an extract of life. These two ideas, I shall set aside for the moment and bring into play another idea that came up during this travelling time.

      While away I set myself a daily task of seeing whether I could merely observe each new place, captured, as it were, in a quadrant, without bringing remembered other places, other geographies, into the picture. How hard that was, for each place evoked memories of other special places: the uplifted and valleyed lie of  land, the angle of the trees, the smells of mangrove and seaside, the pattern of houses, the blossom here and there, the cultural blends of peoples, the lilt of voices familiar and unfamiliar, etc, etc. Is it possible, anyway, to hold away the memories one has in the face of new encounters; is it possible to see new, without the shaping of one’s eyes by the old?

     The early paintings of Australian and New Zealand animals and plants  by visiting European artists show clearly the influences of the old homeland: kangaroos with deer faces and bandicoots that look like large rats with stripes, and trees shaped by the sight of exotica found elsewhere in the world. Sorting the classifications of flora and fauna is still continuing: this from the more familiar that. So how possible is it to perceive things as new? 

      It occurred to me that this latter task is certainly a useful meditation, but though to see new maybe an admirable and barely achievable  aim, the very awareness that one is not seeing new but rather through eyes that alight upon the new as though upon the familiar is a valuable part of the exercise. The exercise is essentially one of awareness, after all. Just knowing that the eyes we see with are the eyes we customarily use in seeing is perhaps useful enough.

      Yet it isn’t the whole truth of it. We can see new in increments, sometimes, and see new in leaps and bounds as well. The old European artists learned to see Australian and New Zealand critters and flora more truly to their actual forms, processes and types as they studied them with more knowledge and saw them interacting in their environment. Knowing is a valuable key to seeing. The thrown quadrant is not an exercise devoid of previous learning, but a coming to knowing through previous comings to knowing. The knowledge acquired is a culmination of other knowledges, inside and beyond the discipline the knowing may (for this time) be located. Thus one piece of knowledge is shaped by many pieces of knowledge from a variety of disciplines.

     All these musings have a profound parallel to the therapeutic process. When a client embarks on their journey of self discovery they bring their old, as well as newly discovered, ways of seeing into our conversation and I contribute my way of seeing, combined with the various other knowledges I have acquired, plus the experiments we might do together, and the blended insights forge a new alchemy, a new seeing and  new, but not foreign, possibilities for an enriched life. No knowledge is every wasted nor unacknowledged.  Seeing new in the therapeutic situation is extraordinary for it may be started in a single session of one hour and brewed into the week or weeks that lie ahead.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell