You Make Sense.
My five-year-old daughter, my partner and I have been working our way through an ambitious 2,000-piece Disney puzzle splayed across our living room floor for the past few months. Occasionally we'll have a whole scene of Dumbo, Bambi or Ariel complete except for one missing piece. We'll scour all the possible fit pieces, but sometimes just won't seem to be able to find the missing piece for weeks.
Then at some point I'll stand up, scan the options from a new, broader perspective, and my eyes will land on a piece I hadn't viewed as a possibility for the space before. We'll pop it in, and voilà — mystery solved.
When you see that singular piece on its own, out of context, it doesn't seem to fit.
But when you view the piece within the context of all its surrounding pieces, colors and details, it clicks. It totally makes sense.
This is how human behavior can be, too.
We might judge ourselves for an outburst we make in the midst of a tough reactive moment. We may think, “Where on Earth did that crazy trigger come from??” Or “What was I thinking?!”
Or we might judge someone else for their reaction to an intense moment: “What is wrong with them?! How could they be so (cruel, careless, selfish, tuned out)?”
But if we can zoom out of our limited view of this singular moment and take a look "from above” at the bigger picture, we can see how the dots connect and glimpse how just maybe that reaction in those circumstances in that moment actually makes perfect sense.
Because all parts of all us humans make sense on some level once we access a complete enough view of their origin story and the context within which they've manifested in the present moment.
And once our minds can wrap around the genuine understanding of why, given those circumstances and that context, someone (maybe you yourself) might have behaved the way they did in a given moment, our heart naturally softens a bit too.
Compassion is a natural byproduct of full-context understanding.
So one compassion- and connection-enhancing practice you can try on when your mind is feeling utterly baffled by how you or someone around you could have done a particular thing in such a reactive way is getting curious by asking yourself:
"Given the circumstances, conditioning and consciousness available in this moment, how could this reaction make sense?"
These minds of ours, slippery as they can be, are great at homing in when we give them a clear task for where to place their attention.
So if you genuinely seek to understand someone better – including yourself – you likely will.
And once something or someone makes sense to your mind, your heart will naturally be moved toward more compassionate understanding and action. And I think we can all agree that that’s something our world could use a strong extra dose of these days, yes?
Lots of Love,