Looking through a keyhole: what are we missing?
Today was full of delightful reconnections. Conversations with colleagues and peers, picking up threads again after the pauses of life and work.
All conversations were on Teams or by phone, except one. For that meeting, we chose to surround ourselves with art.
A photographic exhibition by Sylvie Toutain
The galleries around London Bridge, our midpoint for meeting, were fewer than hoped for. We ended up in Southwark Cathedral’s café, surrounded by Sylvie Toutain’s exhibition of churches and cathedrals around the world, each viewed through a keyhole.
Each photograph offered only a partial glimpse. A sliver of altar. A few pews. A stream of light.
I found myself wanting to fling the doors open and see more! Were there people there? Was it silent or alive with sound? What textures were just out of frame?
Throughout the day, in the pauses between my conversations online, my thoughts kept returning to that feeling. To what else we might not be seeing fully.
Where are our views restricted?
And by what?
Do we actively choose the lenses we look through?
Or do we simply grow used to them?
A photographic exhibition by Sylvie Toutain
One photograph showed only the keyhole itself.
I stood there, perhaps longer than I expected, unable to see beyond the immediate lens. Thinking about how much time we spend reinforcing the rightness of our perspective. The completeness of our own view. When maybe what we’re seeing is the equivalent of one pew, from one angle, at one moment in time.
How can we broaden the lenses we look through?
Or unlock the door and walk through.
Which reminded me of the ending of Glennon Doyle’s book, Untamed. She describes feeling trapped in an uncomfortable situation, frustrated by a door she believes is locked. Only to realise: “these doors, they’re not even locked.”
I keep returning to that idea.
How many constraints are truly real?
And… how many feel real because we’ve never tested them?
[This isn’t to discount or diminish the constraints that are real]
But, I find myself sitting with deep hope. That more and more people are taking one or two steps forward – to open a door; to start a new conversation or to visit places outside our own perspective and lived experience.
So that what comes into view, when we let ourselves see, is far beyond the immediate and the expected.
Thinking Out Loud is where I share short pieces of thinking from the middle of the work. Ideas, questions and lived experiences, offered while they’re still forming. (Tiny Experiments Pact: Day 19/100).