Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful face on an empty head. (Proverbs 11:22 MSG)
I get distracted. Easily. At times, that means I see the flowers other people miss. At other times, that means I’m looking at flowers while every other person is running away from a swarm of bees. I recently downloaded a background on my phone that mimics the conditions outside in real time. This morning, as I picked up the phone to check a notification, I noticed the sun was rising on my screen. I’d never seen this transition before and was fascinated by how it was animated. Then I realized; I’m standing next to a window. I could just open the curtains and watch the sun actually rising instead of watching a 99 cent imitation.
There is nothing inherently wrong with distractions. Often times they are unavoidable and foisted on us by external factors. Where we fall into trouble is when the distractions become the goal. When the peripheral becomes the focus and the imitation becomes the real we begin losing our connections to life. The world becomes our world. This is the egocentricity that leads to falling in love with a pig because there’s a gold ring in its snout. This is the egocentricity that leads to falling in love with a beautiful face on an empty head. This is the egocentricity that misses the point and is consumed with self to the exclusion of the other.
There is nothing inherently wrong with distractions. Often times they are unavoidable and foisted on us by external factors. Where we fall into trouble is when the distractions become the goal. When the peripheral becomes the focus and the imitation becomes the real we begin losing our connections to life. The world becomes our world. This is the egocentricity that leads to falling in love with a pig because there’s a gold ring in its snout. This is the egocentricity that leads to falling in love with a beautiful face on an empty head. This is the egocentricity that misses the point and is consumed with self to the exclusion of the other.
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| (C) Nathan D. Croy, 2013 |