Rinse Your Eyes

I finished reading a book called The Gold Mine Effect by Rasmus Ankersen about cracking the secrets of high performance. It was at the end of the book, in the Epilogue, that he stated something that I find really intriguing about people in today’s society.

He wrote:

In Indonesia they have a beautiful expression for travel: to rinse your eyes. When you stay at home, caught up in the routines of your everyday life, your vision becomes cloudy. The same things pass before your eyes day in, day out, you stop being about to really see them. When you hear the same words spoken again and again, you stop really listening. Traveling gives you your eyes and ears back. It blows away the cobwebs and forces you to see the world afresh.

This is a true fact, isn’t it? When you hear from the same people, go to the same places, sit with people you know, you are likely to never change or see another point of view. It is kind of like a family reunion where they all talk to each other then it is time to eat a picnic lunch and all the immediate families sit together. They don’t sit by their aunts and uncles or cousin from out of state, they sit with their parents or children. We are afraid to sit with them as their views may be different from ours and then we may have to defend the way we think and live.

Think about this. When is the last time you sat on your front porch, back porch, or in your yard and remarked about the beauty that surrounds you? We can go somewhere else and get all ah’d about the scenery or the sunset because we have never view it from there.

We overlook so much. It is time to get out and smell the roses…. Somewhere else.

“People who don’t travel cannot have a global view, all they see is what’s in front of them. Those people cannot accept new things because all they know is where they live.” -Martin Yan

The opinions in this blog belong to Tom Knuppel