Is your canvas clean?

“Bye… I am ready, I am leaving”. Many of us say this sentence at least once a day while we are leaving for work or a meeting or anywhere out but how many of us are actually ready when we say that ‘we are ready’. Is it only taking a shower and dressing up that we need to do? Many a times, we manage to do it perfectly well but miss another important readiness. Readiness to listen without judgments, readiness to discuss without assumptions or perceptions, readiness to go with a clear mind, just like a clear canvas and readiness to recolor the canvas with the new colors of the day that we would experience.

Yes, we usually carry the same canvas which doesn’t have any space left to absorb any new idea or experience. We carry along the same burden of perceptions with which we arrived home yesterday and probably we have been doing this for so long now and have already missed so much.

Did you ever think that the disagreement that your peer showed towards your opinion is still so fresh that you don’t want to discuss any other thought since you assume that it will face the same fate or because you have heard that this one person never has good ideas, you are disinterested in an idea being discussed by him/her, or because you feel that this one person has a history of conflicts, you avoid planning a meeting with him/her or because it’s a new and a junior member, he/she might not have valuable inputs or simply, this man doesn’t have a wide social circle, because he is not tolerant. I am sure many of us will be able to relate with many such assumptions.

Why do we take so much of power to judge and define people and look at them through the same old lens of perception and judgments?

We are not ready to absorb or even listen. No matter, how much you try to cover your thoughts, these are somewhere reflected in your body language and even if that person was not really as you assumed, he/she reflects your assumptions back because those judgments were sensed by him/her as well and made him/her uncomfortable while causing a change in behavior. We usually don’t even put an effort to know the real reason behind someone’s behavior’s change and hence another perception comes into picture.

We certainly miss many wonderful people, relationships and experiences because we didn’t leave that empty space and have been moving out with the same canvas everyday without cleaning it.

There are many new wonderful and learning experiences which are waiting to embrace us, only if we are willing to keep those perceptions at a bay and embrace them.

So, tomorrow when you step out and say that “I am ready”, take a minute and consider if your canvas is clean and you are actually ready.