Looking Through Lenses Quotes

Grace is everywhere, like lenses that go unnoticed because you are looking through them.

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.

we cannot see what is “out there” merely by looking around. Everything depends on the lenses through which we view the world. By putting on new lenses, we can see things that would otherwise remain invisible.

That’s what being depressed does. It’s like a supermassive black hole between your sense of self and your actual self, and all you can see is the way you look through the gravitational lensing of your own inadequacies. “Hey.

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

Thoughts are like lenses through which we look at our world.

Rarely," said Dax to himself, "does a soldier see with naked eyes. He is nearly always looking through lenses, lenses which are made of the insignia of his rank.

Take your place, then. Look at what happened from every side and consider all the other ways it could have gone. Consider, even, an Africa unconquered altogether. Imagine those first Portuguese adventurers approaching the shore, spying on the jungle’s edge through their fitted brass lenses. Imagine that by some miracle of dread or reverence they lowered their spyglasses, turned, set their riggings, sailed on. Imagine all who came after doing the same. What would that Africa be now? All I can think of is the other okapi, the one they used to believe in. A unicorn that could look you in the eye.

You'll never understand me as long as you're looking at me through society's lenses.

One of the signature mistakes with empathy is that we believe we can take our lenses off and look through the lenses of someone else. We can’t. Our lenses are soldered to who we are. What we can do, however, is honor people’s perspectives as truth even when they’re different from ours. That’s a challenge if you were raised in majority culture—white, straight, male, middle-class, Christian—and you were likely taught that your perspective is the correct perspective and everyone else needs to adjust their lens. Or, more accurately, you weren’t taught anything about perspective taking, and the default—My truth is the truth—is reinforced by every system and situation you encounter.

This country life doesn’t look so bad from the window. It melts your heart. It warms your soul.lets you think about the possibility of quiet and how quiet is beautiful when seen through the proper lenses and mind-set.

The VVV Visors had the weird knack of twisting your worldview: the more you looked at the world through their tangerine lenses, the more reality distorted and shifted to fit your new point of view. This made Veravisum Virtual Visors incredibly unreliable, given their proclivity to redact your reality, confirm your private opinions and magnify your cognitive bias.

When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum. Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead pergaps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness in crowds, or susceptbility to sickness have been lived before. We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive de world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, wheter or not we look down to acknowledge them.

Chance held them up to the light. “Pink?” he said as he looked through the lenses. It was not his favorite color. “Rose,” William corrected. “It’s hard to look at mortal life any other way. View it through clear lenses and it breaks your heart.

So why does the world appear stable to you when you’re looking at it? Why doesn’t it appear as jerky and nauseating as the poorly filmed video? Here’s why: your internal model operates under the assumption that the world outside is stable. Your eyes are not like video cameras – they simply venture out to find more details to feed into the internal model. They’re not like camera lenses that you’re seeing through; they’re gathering bits of data to feed the world inside your skull." The Brain: The Story of You - David Eagleman

The role of biblical counselors is facilitate the discovery of a greater God awareness through spiritual eyes that look at life through scriptural lenses.

We must take into consideration the opinions of others; simply because we all look at the world through different lenses.

We all look at our parents through rose-colored glasses. Those lenses make you miss their flaws, overlook their shortcomings...and still be able to love them unconditionally.

Our memories and experiences are the lenses through which we see the world, and even though Calvin and I were looking at the same exact lights, I knew we were seeing different things, and I wished I could see them through his eyes.

For me, there are actually two lenses through which to view ‘what happened to you.’ There is the science-based explanation of the effect early trauma has on the brain. And then there are the myriad daily actions each of us take throughout our lives that are the result of, and that reflect back on, such trauma. These are the actions that, on the surface, look like bad decisions, bad habits, self-sabotage, self-destruction-the actions that cause others to judge.

The lenses and filters that we see the world through are so firmly attached to our faces that it requires great awareness and then courage to pull the lenses off and look at ourselves and the world around us from any other viewpoint.

What unnerved me more than all the rest were her sunglasses. I could not see her eyes but, as I remembered the inhuman green irises from the poster, her dark lenses seemed to develop the force of a searchlight; I had the impression that from behind them she was looking through my skin and into my very soul. I drew a veil over myself, masked myself in neutrality, hid behind my appearance.

One evening he appeared with an infant in his arms at the door of his ex-wife, Martha. Because Briony, his lovely young wife after Martha, had died. Of what? We’ll get to that. I can’t do this alone, Andrew said, as Martha stared at him from the open doorway. It happened to have been snowing that night, and Martha was transfixed by the soft creature-like snowflakes alighting on Andrew’s NY Yankees hat brim. Martha was like that, enrapt by the peripheral things as if setting them to music. Even in ordinary times, she was slow to respond, looking at you with her large dark rolling protuberant eyes. Then the smile would come, or the nod, or the shake of the head. Meanwhile the heat from her home drifted through the open door and fogged up Andrew’s eyeglasses. He stood there behind his foggy lenses like a blind man in the snowfall and was without volition when at last she reached out, gently took the swaddled infant from him, stepped back, and closed the door in his face.

Khizar, can you see that star emitting bright yellow light?” She asked me while handing over the binocular she was using to see the stars. We were standing on the terrace of our university cafe. I looked through the very powerful lenses of the binocular and said “Yes, I can see. Looks like a star that must have died millions of years ago but we can still see the stardust it emitted while exploding” She took the binocular from my hands, looked into my eyes and said “Khizar, you know memories are like those particles of the stardust of a star which died millions of years ago but we can see them emitting lights now. I hope you won’t become a star that once existed in my universe”  I looked at her. Except for the tears floating in her eyes betraying the emotional turmoil she was suffering from, she was as calm as the sea is after a storm. They say that every atom in a human body is the grain of the stardust of the stars which exploded millions of years ago. Then I understood why her eyes used to sparkle when she was looking at me.

Our eyes will make no progress against the mystery of recovery so long as we look at the addicted person through 12-step lenses. To say that such a person is powerless – and insane, morally deficient, filled with wrongs, a menace to others, disoriented, beyond human assistance, afflicted with a progressive fatal disease, and genetically different from normal humans – is to declare that the person’s inner nature is a vile and empty wasteland. It is to deny that there is a better self inside. If that is true, recovery is inexplicable, a random act of God, an inscrutable mystery.

If we look through a piece of glass, irregularities and impurities may distort and discolor the impression of what we see. If we regard something through a convex lens, it appears to be upside down. But if we place a concave lens in front of the convex lens, we correct the distortion in the convex lens and things no longer appear topsy-turvy. Each one of us regards the world through his own lens, his own glasses. The effect of those glasses is that, even though we may be looking at the same thing, not all of us actually see the same thing. The lenses are ground by each individual’s upbringing, disposition and other factors.

I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen —the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly— I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. —It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip —if you could call it a lip— grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels—until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.

Every time he moved, with every breath he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings. She tried to convey how it was like travelling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag. It took Ali’s breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling. She ran her fingers along his back, and the bone and the muscle and hadal ink and scar tissue and the callouses from his pack straps astonished her. This was the body of a slave. Down from the Egypt, eye of the sun, in front of the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death. Ali got one good look, then closed her eyes to the heat. In her mind, she imagined Ike sitting in the raft across from her wearing a vast grin while the pyre reflected off the lenses of his glacier glasses. That put a smile on her face. In death, he had become the light. There comes a time on every big mountain when you descend the snows and cross a border back to life. It is a first patch of green grass by the trail, or a waft of the forests far below, or the trickle of snowmelt braiding into a stream. Always before, whether he had been gone an hour or a week or much longer – and no matter how many mountains he had left behind – it was, for Ike, an instant that registered in his whole being. Ike was swept with a sense not of departure, but of advent. Not of survival. But of grace.

All of us can get lost in the sea of humanity and just think that we are who and what other people say we are based on their preconceptions. All of us have preconceptions about other people. We preconceive about people based on how we perceive ourselves. In other words, we don’t see people, places, and things how they are—we see them through the lens of how we are. For example, if you look at a lemon with sunglasses that have blue lenses, what color is the lemon? Green . . . right? No, it is yellow. The color of the lemon does not change, but how we see the lemon does. Most people’s preconceptions stem from the misconceptions they have about themselves, based on what they have come to believe about themselves. We all have limited knowledge about ourselves.

As human beings, we tend to look at things through the lenses of cultural standards. Much like the Israelites, we view success in the human terms of material wealth. By those standards, it’s okay to hoard goods because if we can hoard goods it means we have the means to do so and so we are successful. During this time of Lent, we are asked to look at ourselves through a different lens. We are to look at our selves through God’s lens. The idea of any spiritual practice is to help us see our own flaws through the light of God, not humanity. The idea of the spiritual practice is not so much to point the flaws as it is to see the goodness, the Godness, which is in each of us. All of us are flawed and God loves us anyway. It is only in acknowledging and accepting these flaws that we can begin to see the Godliness that is in each of us.

Leo continued to kiss her long after he should have stopped, not only for the sheer pleasure of it, but also because he was reluctant to face what would happen afterward. Their cantankerous relationship could not resume as usual after something like this. It had been set on a new track with an unknown destination, and Leo was certain that neither of them were going to like where it led. Finding that he couldn’t release her all at once, he did it by degrees, letting his mouth nuzzle the edge of her jaw, following to the vulnerable hollow behind her ear. Her pulse was swift and vibrant against his lips. “Marks,” he said on a rough breath, “I was afraid of this. Somehow I knew…” Breaking off, he lifted his head and looked down at her. She squinted through the mist that had accumulated on her lenses. “My spectacles … I’ve lost them again.” “No, you haven’t. There’s steam on the lenses.

But perhaps an even greater principle was at stake, Bateson realized. The flow of biological information was not restricted to heredity. It was coursing through all of biology. The transmission of hereditary traits was just one instance of information flow-but if you looked deeply, squinting your conceptual lenses, it was easy to imagine information moving pervasively through the entire living world. The unfurling of an embryo; the reach of a plant toward sunlight; the ritual dance of bees-every biological activity required the decoding of coded instructions. Might Mendel, then, have also stumbled on the essential structure of these instructions? Were units of information guiding each of these processes? "Each of us who now looks at his own patch of work sees Mendel's clues running through it," Bateson proposed. "We have only touched the edge of that new country which is stretching out before us....The experimental study of heredity...is second to no branch of science in the magnitude of the results it offers.

Movies create the parameters against which we measure our lives.  They can either be a force for positive change or reinforce existing structures.  Mason asks, “How do we take control of the hallucination?”  The series itself is a response:  The Invisibles is a fictional work that’s programmed to redefine the way we view reality.  Download this series into your mind, and you’ll come out the other side changed. This also ties into the way that Mason has discussed movies over the course of the series.  By finding the evolutionary message in non-intellectual, popular works like Speed and Independence Day, Mason is trying to take control of the hallucination.  Any work of art does not exist in a vacuum.  We assess it through cultural and social lenses, biased by our own circumstances and background.  Mason seeks out Invisible messages in everything he sees, and because that’s what he’s looking for, he finds them.  His goal is to teach everyone to think like that, to not see the intended pro-America or pro-hetero-normative message of a typical studio film, to instead find something subversive lurking in the most mundane entertainments.  If people build their lives in response to the films they see, then controlling the way they perceive the films means controlling the future direction of their lives. Next,

Christian art understands that images are important partly because they can generate compassion, the fragile quality which enables the boundaries of our egos to dissolve, helps us to recognize ourselves in the experiences of strangers and can make their pain matter to us as much as our own. Art has a role to play in this manoeuvre of the mind upon which, not coincidentally, civilization itself is founded, because the unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness. As if to reinforce the idea that to be human is, above all else, to partake in a common vulnerability to misfortune, disease and violence, Christian art returns us relentlessly to the flesh, whether in the form of the infant Jesus’s plump cheeks or of the taut, broken skin over his ribcage in his final hours. The message is clear: even if we do not bleed to death on a cross, simply by virtue of being human we will each of us suffer our share of agony and indignity, each face appalling, intractable realities which may nevertheless kindle in us feelings of mutuality. Christianity hints that if our bodies were immune to pain or decay, we would be monsters.

Why would you do that with me? A simple kiss was enough. What could you be thinking?" "What indeed." He pushed a hand through his hair, more than a little offended at her accusatory tone. "I'm male. You rubbed your... femaleness all over me. I didn't think. I reacted." "You reacted." "Yes." "To..." She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "To me." "It is a natural response. Aren't you a scientist? Then you should understand. Any red-blooded man would react to such stimulus." She stepped back. She dipped her chin and peered at him over her spectacles. "So you find me stimulating." "That's not what I-" He bit off the rest of that sentence. The only way to end a nonsensical conversation was to simply cease talking. Colin drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders. He closed his eyes briefly. And then he opened them and looked at her. Really looked at her, as though for the first time. He saw thick, dark hair a man could gather by the fistful. Prim spectacles, perched on a gently sloped nose. Behind the lenses, wide-set eyes- dark and intelligent. And that mouth. That ripe, pouting, sensual mouth. He let his gaze drift down her form. There was a wicked thrill to knowing lushness smoldered beneath that modest sprigged muslin gown. To having felt her shape, scouting and chartering her body with all the nerve endings of his own. Their bodies had met. More than that. They'd grown acquainted. Nothing more would come from it, of course. Colin had rules for himself, and as for her... she didn't even liked him, or pretend to. But she showed up in the middle of the night, hatching schemes that skirted the line between academic logic and reckless adventure. She started kisses she had no notion how to continue. Taken all together, she was simply... A surprise. A fresh, bracing gust of the unexpected, for good or ill. "Perhaps," he said cautiously, "I do find you stimulating.

The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine, this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of the computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface. Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's father, who was stationed in Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept bringing them back from his stints in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that when he took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite striptease as they emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. And once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia. . . . It made him feel naked and weak and brave. The lens can see half of the universe -- the half that is above the computer, which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep track of where Hiro is and what direction he's looking in. Down inside the computer are three lasers -- a red one, a green one, and a blue one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful enough to burn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry your frontals, lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school, these three colors of light can be combined, with different intensities, to produce any color that Hiro's eye is capable of seeing. In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality. By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack. So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.

Even though the gospel is a set of truths to understand and believe, it cannot remain a set of beliefs if it is truly believed and understood. As Lesslie Newbigin states, “The Christian story provides us with such a set of lenses, not something for us to look at, but for us to look through.”2 Paul says as much in Romans 12:1, when he looks back on his rich exposition of the doctrine of justification in chapters 1–11 and states, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices.” Scripture teaches that the gospel creates an entire way of life and affects literally everything about us. It is a power (Rom 1:16–17) that creates new life in us (Col 1:5–6; 1 Pet 1:23–25).

There’s nothing surprising about this. Everybody knows that big cities are rarer than small ones. What’s less obvious, though, is that city sizes nevertheless follow a beautifully simple distribution . . . as long as you look at them through logarithmic lenses.

From her vantage point, looking up at [Ian] through the water-spotted and slightly blurry lenses of her glasses, he was quite literally larger than life. Right at that moment, with his hands up on his head, his muscular chest bare, and his boxer shorts clinging to him in a most revealing way, water matting the hair on his chest and his legs and his eyelashes, he was ridiculously attractive. Even with his more conventionally handsome brother standing next to him. Of course the fact that Aaron was looking down at her with unconcealed dislike in his pretty hazel eyes might’ve had something to with it, as if she weren’t a person but instead a pile of excrement left on his pool deck by a wart-covered troll with an intestinal ailment.

There.  Right there,” as I point to the cluster of undergrowth that hugs the barrier. He squints and looks through the lenses of his binoculars.  “Oh, okay.  I see,” he says.  “So we wait in those shrubs, until they go in?” I take another look for myself and scan the small portion of the property that’s visible.  “Remember the other day when we snuck up and looked in the gate?” I ask. “You mean the day you said you weren’t waiting around anymore and ran over there without even discussing it first?  That day?” I blush at his recount of the lead-up to our venture.  “Yeah, that day,” I say. “Okay, what about it?  You know, other than learning that you’re kind of reckless.” “Reckless?” My voice pitches up an octave, making plain my outrage.  “Are you kidding me?  Me, reckless?” I start, determined to scold him. “Don’t misunderstand me, Avery.  I meant

Even though the gospel is a set of truths to understand and believe, it cannot remain a set of beliefs if it is truly believed and understood. As Lesslie Newbigin states, “The Christian story provides us with such a set of lenses, not something for us to look at, but for us to look through.”2

One day a fellow countryman from Valencia, Jorge Esteban, arrived to stay with the sisters. He had a travel agency back home and was driving around West Africa collecting materials for a tourist brochure. Jorge was a cheerful, merry, energetic man, naturally convivial. He felt at home everywhere, at ease with everyone. He spent only one day with us. He paid no heed to the scorching sun; the heat only seemed to energize him. He unpacked a bag full of cameras, lenses, filters, rolls of film, and began walking around the street, chatting with people, joking, making various sorts of promises. That done, he placed his Canon on a tripod, took out a loud referee’s whistle, and blew it. I was looking out the window and couldn’t believe my eyes. Instantly, the street filled with people. In a matter of seconds they formed a large circle and began to dance. I don’t know where the children came from. They had empty cans, which they beat rhythmically. Everyone was keeping the rhythm, clapping their hands and stomping their feet. People woke up, the blood flowed again through their veins, they became animated. Their pleasure in this dance, their happiness in finding themselves alive again, was palpable. Something started to happen in this street, around them, within them. The walls of the houses moved, the shadows stirred. More and more people joined the ring of dancers, which grew, swelled, and accelerated. The crowd of onlookers was also dancing, the whole street, everyone. Colorful bou-bous, white djellabahs, blue turbans, all were swaying. There is no asphalt or pavement here, so billows of dust soon began to rise above the dancers, dark, thick, hot, choking, and these clouds, just like ones from a raging fire, drew more people still from the surrounding areas. Before long the entire neighborhood was shimmying, shaking, partying—right in the middle of the worst, most debilitating and unbearable noontime heat. Partying? No, this was something different, something bigger, something loftier and more important. You had only to look at the faces of the dancers. They were attentive, listening intently to the loud rhythm the children beat on their tin cans, concentrating, so that the sliding of their feet, the swaying of their hips, the turns of their arms, and the bobbing of their heads corresponded to it. And they looked determined, decisive, alive to the significance of this moment in which they were able to express themselves, participate, prove their presence. Idle and superfluous all day long, all at once they had become visible, needed, and important. They existed. They created.

June 9 SEEK TO LIVE IN MY LOVE, which covers a multitude of sins: both yours and others’. Wear My Love like a cloak of Light, covering you from head to toe. Have no fear, for perfect Love decimates fear. Look at other people through lenses of Love; see them from My perspective. This is how you walk in the Light, and it pleases Me.

As Lucetta continued going on and on about what he should do, in that rather bossy manner he’d never imagined she possessed, he found himself having a bit of a difficult time concentrating on what she was saying. Her lips were moving rapidly, and while he was certain she was probably giving him sound advice, he found himself more concerned with the idea that it seemed to him as if she’d done something to her lips—something that made them seem quite spinster-looking, as if their very plumpness had been squeezed right out of them. The lips he was looking at now truly did seem to belong to a woman who’d sport a wart on her face, but . . . how had she managed to make them appear so unattractive, so . . . Taking a step closer to her, he leaned forward, trying to puzzle out the mystery behind her lips. They looked thin, which was very peculiar, although . . . perhaps it was the wart she’d so cleverly put right above the upper lip that was . . . “Why are you staring at me like that? Has the wart moved?” Dragging his attention away from the wart in question, he looked up and caught her eye through the smudged lenses that he had no idea how she could see out of. Instead of answering her, though, his hand rose, almost of its own accord it seemed, and the next thing he knew, he’d plucked the phony wart straight off her face. “What has gotten into you?” she demanded. “I need that wart, and . . . did you just throw that over your shoulder?” “It was disgusting,” he said, dusting his hands together, pleased with himself over taking control of the wart even though Lucetta looked about ready to strangle him. “It was meant to be disgusting.” “Well, now it’s gone.” Lucetta let out a grunt before she tried to scoot around him, seemingly intent on looking for the wart he’d just tossed aside. Before she could pass him, though, he reached out, took hold of her shoulders and felt her tense. “What are you doing?” Instead of answering her, he drew her closer, smiling just a touch when he heard her take a swift intake of breath. “Bram . . . really . . . what are you doing?” “Trying to figure something out,” he said as he moved one of his hands from her shoulder and used a single finger to take a poke at her lip. “It’s still full,” he said, more to himself than to her. He poked it again before he pulled at her lower lip, exposing her teeth in the process. “You no longer appear to be missing your teeth.” “Stop that.” She smacked his hand away. “I knew I shouldn’t have snuck that second cookie backstage. It must have knocked the gum off.” “You used gum?” Lucetta nodded. “I did, Black Jack gum, created by Mr. Thomas Adams, who opened the first gum factory with his sons in 1870, although I suppose now is not actually the time to recite history when faced with such a concerning situation.” She blew out a breath. “I’m normally very careful when I use gum to make it appear as if I’m missing teeth, but I must have swallowed it when I ate that cookie.” “Do you think that’ll hurt you?” Bram asked slowly. “Hard to know at this point.” She closed her eyes and shook her head a mere moment later. “No, I haven’t read anything regarding a medical condition one can expect after swallowing gum.” Bram frowned as Lucetta opened her eyes. “You know it’s really not a normal occurrence for people to be able to summon up random tidbits like that at will, don’t you?” A ghost of a smile played around Lucetta’s mouth. “I’ve never claimed to be normal, Bram.” That smile struck him straight through his heart. It was a genuine smile, with a bit of a self-deprecating edge to it, and . . . Without allowing himself a second to reconsider, he leaned toward her as his hand moved from her shoulder to her waist, and pulling her ever so slowly against him, he lowered his lips to hers.

Learning to read the Bible through the eyes of Christians from a different time and place will readily reveal the distorting effect of our own cultural, historical, linguistic, philosophical and, yes, even theological lenses. This is not to assert that the fathers did not have their own warped perspectives and blind spots. Itis to argue, however, that we will not arrive at perspective and clarity regarding our own strengths and weaknesses if we refuse to look beyond our own theological and hermeneutical noses.

When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum. Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead perhaps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness in crowds, or susceptbility to sickness have been lived before. We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive de world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, wheter or not we look down to acknowledge them.

Trends are only useful when we look at them through multiple lenses as we gaze across all six time zones. We must think of trends as signposts that can illuminate the conditions we will likely encounter at some point in the future, even if that future is a century away. Or, as we’re about to see, as close as 1.3 light-seconds.

Putting it in my own words, [Edwards] said that the infinite complexity of the divine mind is such that God has the capacity to look at the world through two lenses. He can look through a narrow lens or through a wide-angle lens. When God looks at a painful or wicked event through his narrow lens, he sees the tragedy or sin for what it is in itself and he is angered and grieved. "I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the LORD God" (Ezekiel 18:32). But when God looks at a painful or wicked event through his wide-angle lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin in relation to everything leading up to it and everything flowing out from it. He sees it in all the connections and effects that form a pattern or mosaic stretching into eternity. This mosaic- in all its parts- good and evil- brings him delight.

A grace-full Christian is one who looks at the world through “grace-tinted lenses.

Cat worked tirelessly, absorbed in the subtle changes of light and texture and composition. She darted around Travis like a fire, taking photos of the captain and his ship from various angles. Travis didn’t interfere or require her conversation. He could sense the excitement of creation flooding through her as clearly as he felt it in himself when elusive details of hull design would condense in his mind. Smiling, he watched his lover, enjoying her intense concentration on her work. She handled cameras and lenses with the same total familiarity he handled wind and sail. When her determination to catch the sunlight on the rigging made her forget he was alive, he sat cross-legged on the deck and began splicing rope, not at all upset at being ignored. When Cat realized that Travis wasn’t nearby anymore, she lowered her camera and looked around for him. She found him halfway back on the deck, sitting in a pool of sunlight. His head was bent over some task. Sun glinted over his tawny hair like a miser running fingers through gold. Her heart hesitated, then beat with redoubled strength. She set aside her camera and went to Travis. Without a word she took the rope out of his hands and started pulling off his T-shirt. “What are you doing?” he asked, surprised. “Taking off your shirt.” He blinked, then relaxed beneath Cat’s hands with a pirate’s smile of anticipation. She smiled in return, the serene smile of a sorceress, and threw his T-shirt aside. Then she put rope back into the hands that were reaching for her and picked up her camera once more. “Come back here and finish what you started,” Travis said. “I’m finished. “What about my pants?” “They make a nice contrast with the deck.” “Well, damn.” Disappointed, Travis made a face at the camera, then resumed splicing rope. Cat photographed him as he worked, seated like a god in the center of a golden cataract of light. He watched her with intense, blue-green eyes, measuring her progress around him while she climbed the rigging and the sailing in search of a perfect angle. At one point she miscalculated. He came to his feet in a single motion and snatched her off her perch before she could fall. She laughed and let herself slide down his body, her hands savoring his supple, sun-warmed skin.

Creating Lenses with Excel If you wish to use Excel radar diagrams to simulate lenses, follow these steps: Open a new Excel spreadsheet. Type the word Headers in cell A1 Type the word Score in cell B1 Type your chosen header from cell A2 downwards. Use as many headers as you like. Usually 6 or 8 headers are sufficient. Fill the corresponding B cells with zeros Select cells A1 through B… (as far as you went) Click the Chart Wizard button (the one that has a tiny bar chart on it), or use the menu  - Chart – Chart Type Select the radar type from among the options in the left side of the action box. Click on the Filled Radar chart sub-type on the upper right part of the box. Click Next Make sure that the series choice is Columns. Ignore the way the chart may look in the example. It often looks too small there, but it comes out all right. Click next Add the chart title, if you want. And clear the "show legend" box in the legend tab. Click finish. Click OK to put the chart on the same sheet. When you are with your client, you can type in his chosen scores against each header in the list (replacing the zeros).  Excel will automatically update the chart. If needed, you can print the charts using the file-print

I have four pets,’ Bjørnar Nicolaisen tells me at 69.31°N, ‘two cats and two sea eagles. I feed them all together on the shore, there by the throne, with the best fish in the world!’ He gives a huge laugh, and points east through the window of his living room: snow-filled fields sloping away to a rocky beach that borders a fjord several miles in width. Steel-blue water in the fjord, choppy where the currents are running. Far across the fjord, ranks of smooth-snowed peaks gleam in the late sunlight. They are shaped more wildly than any mountains I have ever seen before. Witches’ hats and shark fins and jabbing fingers, all polished white as porcelain. I cannot see a throne on the shore, though. ‘Here, try these.’ He hands me a pair of binoculars. Black leather-clad barrels, weathered in places to brown. Polished eye-pieces – and a Nazi eagle engraved into the left-hand barrel-back. ‘Wehrmacht-issue,’ says Bjørnar. ‘Beautiful lenses. An officer’s. When my father was dying, he asked me what I wanted from his possessions. “One thing only,” I told him, “the binoculars you took from the Germans.”‘ I lift the binoculars and the shoreline leaps to my eyes, close enough to touch. Calibrated cross-hairs float in my vision. I pan right along the beach. Nothing. I switch back left. Yes, there, a chair of some kind – but six or seven feet tall, built from driftwood lashed and nailed together. It looks like something the ironborn of Westeros might have made. ‘I take the eagles a cod or a saithe whenever I come back from a good day’s fishing. I feed them by my chair, there.’ ‘Bjørnar, you are the only person I know who counts sea eagles among his pets.’ ‘I am more of a cat person,’ Bjørnar replies. ‘Than a dog person or than an eagle person?’ ‘Than a people person!’ Bjørnar laughs and laughs – a deep, explosive laugh coming from far inside his chest.

Looking through rose colored glasses doesn’t presume we don’t see what’s real and true, but it does mean we’re choosing a lovely hue for a more optimistic view.

People have looked at these questions from every possible angle. Abraham Maslow famously looked at how human needs evolve along the human journey, from basic physiological needs to self-actualization. Others looked at development through the lenses of worldviews (Gebser, among others), cognitive capacities (Piaget), values (Graves), moral development (Kohlberg, Gilligan), self-identity (Loevinger), spirituality (Fowler), leadership (Cook-Greuter, Kegan, Torbert), and so on.

Take for instance a phenomenon called frustrated spontaneous emission. It sounds like an embarrassing sexual complaint that psychotherapy might help with. In fact, it involves the decay of radioactive particles, which ordinarily takes place at a predictably random rate. The exception, however, is when radioactive material is placed in an environment that cannot absorb the photons that are emitted by decay. In that case, decay ceases—the atoms become “frustrated.” How do these atoms “know” to stop decaying until conditions are suitable? According to Wharton, the unpredictable decay of radioactive particles may be determined in part by whatever receives their emitted photons in the future.20 Decay may not really be random at all, in other words. Another quantum mystery that arguably becomes less mysterious in a retrocausal world is the quantum Zeno effect. Usually, the results of measurements are unpredictable—again according to the famous uncertainty believed to govern the quantum kingdom—but there is a loophole. Persistent, rapid probing of reality by repeating the same measurement over and over produces repetition of the same “answer” from the physical world, almost as if it is “stopping time” in some sense (hence the name of the effect, which refers to Zeno’s paradoxes like an arrow that must first get halfway to its target, and then halfway from there, and so on, and thus is never able to reach the target at all).21 If the measurement itself is somehow influencing a particle retrocausally, then repeating the same measurement in the same conditions may effectively be influencing the measured particles the same way in their past, thereby producing the consistent behavior. Retrocausation may also be at the basis of a long-known but, again, hitherto unsatisfyingly explained quirk of light’s behavior: Fermat’s principle of least time. Light always takes the fastest possible path to its destination, which means taking the shortest available path through different media like water or glass. It is the rule that accounts for the refraction of light through lenses, and the reason why an object underwater appears displaced from its true location.22 It is yet another example of a creature in the quantum bestiary that makes little sense unless photons somehow “know” where they are going in order to take the most efficient possible route to get there. If the photon’s angle of deflection when entering a refractive medium is somehow determined by its destination, Fermat’s principle would make much more sense. (We will return to Fermat’s principle later in this book; it plays an important role in Ted Chiang’s short story, “Story of Your Life,” the basis for the wonderful precognition movie Arrival.) And retrocausation could also offer new ways of looking at the double-slit experiment and its myriad variants.

Are you around next Sunday?” Mr. Newton encourages. “We’ve business in Southampton this week, but perhaps we might meet up after.” When no one says anything, he prompts with obvious emphasis, “Monty? What do you think?” Henry—Monty—I sincerely have no idea what his name is—looks as though he’s been asked to select a date for his execution. “Must we?” “Don’t,” Mr. Newton says quietly, and they stare at each other for a moment. I can sense some unspoken conversation passing through the air between them. When Henry says nothing more, Mr. Newton turns to me. His smile is truly starting to test the limits of his face. “Brilliant. We’ll see you back here then.” He reaches out a hand to me again and starts to say, “It was so lovely to meet—” But I leap to my feet, strangling the spyglass lenses, and dismiss myself before I am forced to shake hands with a man who is not my brother.

When we see ourselves and our world defined by stereotypical expectations, the very nature of our engagement alters. And our susceptibility to this transformation of behavior may diminish our capacity to appreciate important nuance in our surroundings. In a world where we're looking for 'familiar' or 'similar' through favorable lenses and seeing 'unfamiliar' as somehow lesser, we are at risk of being blind to the self-evident.

The power of language to color one's view of reality is profound. In many instances, the most significant factor determining how an object will be perceived is not the nature of the object itself, but the words employed to characterize it. Operating through the lenses of contrasting linguistic symbols, two persons looking at the same phenomenon are likely to come up with sharply divergent observations. Words can also act as a force for justice or a weapon of repression, an instrument of enlightenment or a source of darkness.

And there, seated at the heart of all that sumptuousness and leaning forward in his chair behind the great desk, was a figure that looked like nothing so much as a dapper but exceedingly despondent frog. The very shape of his head seemed as if it had been altered by a powerful vertical vice, resulting in a symmetrical ovoid with a horizontal polar axis. His complexion was not so much sallow as lightly green. His mouth was unnaturally wide, with thick, tautly stretched lips the color and texture of earthworms. What ears he had were small and circular and somewhat recessed. His nose was broad and rather flat, as if it had been spread on his face unevenly by a butter knife, and had what looked more like nares than full nostrils. The sparse, slick tendrils of his hair were of some murkily nondescript hue and clung unguinously to his scalp. The dense convex lenses of his wire-rimmed spectacles made it seem as if his greenish-gray eyes were peering out at the world from the bottom of a shallow pond, through a thin layer of algae. If he had a jawline, it was not immediately evident where he kept it. His hunched, narrow, rounded shoulders, moreover, amplified the amphibian quality of his appearance. He was, however, dressed in the height of fashion: a high collar and pearl-colored cravat, a waistcoat of forest-green velvet, and a formal coat of lighter, lettuce-green damask with lapels of cream-white satin with pink borders.

we had to pop the lenses out, because every time I would look up—especially since Jim was so much taller than me—we would get the glare. So for all twelve seasons, Leonard doesn’t have lenses in his glasses. But one time I needed to rub my eye and without thinking, put my finger through the frames. They were like, Cut!

For fiction, for example, the thinking jobs are “character,” “problem,” “solution,” and “lesson learned.” For nonfiction, the thinking jobs are “teach?” (meaning what is the author trying to teach the reader) and “point of view?” By second grade, students are accustomed to looking at reading through these lenses;

WE ALL VIEW THE WORLD around us through a unique set of lenses. Much of how we see clinical supervision comes from our own experiences, which have informed our current ideas, beliefs, and practices. Engagement in supervisory conversation invites us into a process about how we can learn to see things differently with “super-vision” – new eyes, new perceptions, new visions. Supervision then becomes a new way of seeing, a super way of visioning (Carroll, 2011). What would happen if we looked at ourselves, our supervisees, our clients, the multiple systems, and all the intertwining relationships in different ways? By sharing our perspectives, I believe that together we can co-create multiple ways of seeing and thinking about the practice of systemic clinical supervision.

He looked down at Bosch through Ray-Bans, though it was well into dusk and a sky of burnt orange clouds was reflected in his mirrored lenses.

I know it is hard, everything looks beautiful through rose colored lenses, even the red flags look pretty.

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides--pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others. "We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said. 13 He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film. "What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've read the. signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now." He seemed immensely pleased by this.

God has the capacity to look at the world through two lenses. When God looks at a painful or wicked event through his narrow lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin for what it is in itself and he is angered and grieved. “I do not delight in the death of anyone, says the Lord God” (Ezek. 18:32). But when God looks at a painful or wicked event through his wide-angle lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin in relation to everything leading up to it and everything flowing out from it. He sees it in all the connections and effects that form a pattern or mosaic stretching into eternity. This mosaic, with all its (good and evil) parts he does delight in (Ps. 115:3).

Even though every discernment is unique, your search for data should always involve collecting four kinds of information: Intrapersonal information (from within your unique self). Ask yourself: What are my personality and work preferences? Time, energy, and health? Economic resources? Do I notice that I am having any particular physical responses as I think about the situation? What do I deeply desire? Interpersonal information (through face-to-face relationships). Ask yourself: Who are the people close to me who will be affected by my choice? How will this proposed option be likely to affect my interpersonal relationships, especially with those close to me or with whom I have prior commitments, especially my family? What supporting relationships exist for me personally? Structural information (from pondering those organizations, personal and impersonal, that exist regardless of the individual players). Ask yourself: What structures are in play here? What are their goals, their reasons for existing? What are their dynamics? What would be my role and responsibility in these systems if I were to make the decision I am pondering? How is power exercised? Who or what is marginalized in these structures, and what would they say if they could talk with me? Information from the natural world (from the environment in which we are embedded). Ask yourself: What is the environment—the physical context, both human and natural—like? How does the human-made environment exist within or against the natural world? Is this an environment that invites or repels me? What kind of impact will my actions have on the environment? After you’ve gathered your data, the next step is to interpret it, and it’s helpful to use the same four categories as interpretive lenses: Intrapersonal (your inner response). Ask yourself: Does the data give me energy? excitement? courage? confidence? tranquillity? satisfaction? Or are my reactions to it more like discouragement, anxiety, insecurity, agitation, dissatisfaction? Or, as is often the case, is my response a mixture of the two? Interpersonal (the reactions between you and those persons close to you or who would be affected by your decision). Ask yourself: How do I feel about the possible effects of my proposed decision on those close to me? What do these people say about my proposed option? How do others who are more objective about the choice facing me interpret the information that I have received; do expert interpreters agree or disagree regarding the information I have uncovered? Structural (what an analysis of the institutions, systems, and structures in which you live and work—or into which you would be moving—suggests about the matter at hand). Ask yourself: How will the various systems in my life have to be readjusted if I move in this direction: family, work, school, community involvement, relationship to worshiping community, and so on? What values are these systems preserving, and are these values worth it to me? In what way are the systems likely to resist my proposed change? What price could I pay? How does this feel to me? 4. Natural world (from the largest perspective, that of the grand scheme of things). Ask yourself: Does being in nature tell me anything about my proposed decision? Will it, or how will it, affect the environment? If I could stand on top of the world and look down, how would this decision appear?

Marks,” he said on a rough breath, “I was afraid of this. Somehow I knew…” Breaking off, he lifted his head and looked down at her. She squinted through the mist that had accumulated on her lenses. “My spectacles … I’ve lost them again.” “No, you haven’t. There’s steam on the lenses.” As the fogged spectacles cleared, Marks shoved at him. She struggled to her feet, frantically swatting away his efforts to help. They stared at each other. It was hard to say which one of them was more appalled. But judging from her expression, it was probably Marks. “This never happened,” she snapped. “If you have the gall ever to mention it, I’ll deny it to my last breath.” She gave her skirts a few agitated whacks to remove the bits of leaves and grass, and shot Leo a fierce warning glance. “I’m going to the house now. And don’t follow me!

Because Aristotle’s was the accepted lens on the universe, centuries of medieval scientists and thinkers went to great lengths to make epicycles work. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century, with one simple but profound observation, that Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus reframed our view of the universe. The planets revolved not around the earth, but around the sun. Finally, understanding that provided a foundation for some of the most important advances in history and the foundation for modern astronomy and calculus. Of course, it took eighteen centuries for someone like Copernicus to see and articulate the flaws in Aristotle’s logic. And even he died without knowing that the world would accept he was right. Changing a well-established view of the world rarely happens overnight—and even when it happens, it still takes time to refine and perfect the right new perspective. In the world of innovation, many companies are stuck in a world of creating “epicycles”: elaborate approximations, estimations, and extrapolations. Because we gather, fine-tune, and cross-reference all manner of data, it seems like we should be getting better and better at predicting success. But if we fail to understand why customers make the choices they make, we’re just getting better and better at a fundamentally flawed process. Without the right understanding of the causal mechanism at the center of the innovation universe, companies are trying to make sense of the universe revolving around the earth. They’re forced to rely on an array of borrowed best practices, probabilistic tools, and tips and tricks that have worked for other companies, but which can’t guarantee success. As you look at innovation through the lenses of the Jobs Theory, what you see is not the customer at the center of the innovation universe, but the customer’s Job to Be Done. It may seem like a small distinction—just a few minutes of arc—but it matters a great deal. In fact, it changes everything.

All their lives, most of these students have looked out at the world through Christian glasses. They have learned to describe what they see in Christian terms and not to ask questions about what they ca not see clearly. Now, having tried on some glasses from other traditions - one or two of which have brought troublesome areas of their lives into sharper focus for the first time - they are suddenly aware of how many ways there are to view reality. The lens is not the landscape. It is a way of transplanting the landscape so that people can walk upright on it, making some sense of what happens to them. To complicate matters, some students realize for the first time that Catholic lenses are different from Protestant ones, just as Asian lenses are different from Native American ones. Remembering that Torah goes with Judaism is a very minor detail to most of them at this point. They are still trying to get their heads around the fact that God may speak more languages than they ever thought, to far more people than they thought, using different methods than they thought. Either that, or the whole thing is fiction.

I had a conversation with a legislator that went something like this: “I don’t believe we can make judgments about the effectiveness of a teacher based only on test scores,” he said. “I don’t believe we should, either,” I responded. “We should look at teacher effectiveness through a variety of lenses. However, I think it’s critical that student achievement growth is a significant one of those factors.” He looked at me skeptically. So I continued: “When I came to Washington, D.C., public schools, eight percent of the eighth graders in the city’s schools were on grade level in mathematics. Eight percent! That means ninety-two percent of our kids did not have the skills and knowledge necessary to be productive members of society.” I told him that when I looked at the evaluations of the adults in the system at the same time, it turned out that 98 percent of teachers were being rated as doing a good job. How can you possibly have that kind of a disconnect? And I asked, “How can you have a functional organization in which all of your employees believe they’re doing a great job, but what they’re producing is 8 percent success?” “Well, that’s not the teacher’s fault,” the legislator said. “Exactly,” I said. “The teachers weren’t the ones who created this broken and bureaucratic system. They know the evaluation system isn’t good. They also know it needs to change.” “But I still don’t think we should look at test scores,” the legislator continued. “It just isn’t fair.” “Let me ask you a question,” I said. “Do you have children?” “Yes,” he said. “I have a daughter who is going into the fourth grade.” “Okay,” I said. “Let’s say that there are two fourth-grade teachers in your daughter’s school. You find out that for the last five years, students in one of the classes have consistently scored in the bottom five percent of the state on standardized test score. The other’s students have consistently scored in the top five percent of the state on the same test. What would you do?” “I’d make sure she was in the classroom of the person who had the high test scores,” he answered—without a hint of irony to his response. “What?” I responded. “But how could you do that? You made that decision solely on the basis of test scores! You didn’t even go into their classrooms!” He stared at me for a moment, confused. Then he smiled and said, “Okay, you got me.” “My point is that student academic achievement does matter,” I said. “It shouldn’t be everything. I think it’s important to consider a broad range of factors in a teacher’s evaluation. But how much students learn has to be a major piece of it.

The lenses through which any nation looks at life are not the ones another nation uses.

When you think about your strengths, you may do the opposite—look through the wrong end of the binoculars so that things look small and unimportant. If you magnify your imperfections and minimize your good points, you’re guaranteed to feel inferior. But the problem isn’t you—it’s the crazy lenses you’re wearing!