Have you ever experienced ‘tunnel vision’?
One of the causes of this is an overloading in the deliberative part of our brain. When it is overloaded, it diverts attention from other things (tunnel vision). Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow says that simply walking fast causes the deliberative part of your brain to work and can lead to tunnel vision. Ever try to get someones attention that is walking fast down a sidewalk?
How does this impact us? On one retreat walk my kids were ready for a rest, though I could have pressed on. When we stopped we looked in the tree and saw the bird of prey pictured in this post. Walking we had been oblivious to its presence, at a pause it was visible to us.
As I reflected about the pace of my life at times and the ‘tunnel vision’ I experience, God invited me to slow down so I could truly see the things he was doing. What else might we see if we slowed down?