The Key May Be Waiting in the Shadows

One recent afternoon my wife and I hiked up a local canyon. On our way back, the sun was beginning to set, and shafts of life were cutting through the oak trees. We stopped to take a few pictures. Here’s one:

As we resumed walking, I began thinking about how our awareness is naturally attracted to whatever in our environment is illuminated.  For example, in this photo, I find myself looking at the lower half where the light is brightest.

This can be a kind of bias — to the tree itself, the parts that I don’t notice because they are in the shadows are just as important as the parts reflecting the sunlight.  I was reminded of a timeless Sufi tale about a man looking for a lost key: 

The great Sufi master Mullah Nasruddin was on his hands and knees searching for something under a streetlamp. A man saw him and asked, “What are you looking for?” “My house key,” Nasruddin replied. “I lost it.” The man joined him in looking for the key, and after a period of fruitless searching, the man asked, “Are you sure you lost it around here?” Nasruddin replied, “Oh, I didn’t lose it around here. I lost it over there, by my house.” “Then why,” the man asked, “are you looking for it over here?” “Because,” Nasruddin said, “The light is so much better over here.”

            This tendency has since become known as the “streetlight effect: “a type of observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look.”[i]

A psychology professor once described how our unconscious mind is often working to solve problems without our awareness, and sometimes we need to give it some space to help us.  He gave the example of trying to remember someone’s name.  We may stop and try harder and harder to concentrate on locating the fact — like turning up the power on our flashlight to maximum power – but that doesn’t seem to help.  He suggested we try letting our focused search go for a minute and shift our attention to something else, like looking out a window.  When we do that, the name we are looking for will often appear in our awareness like a gift out of the blue.   Turning our attention elsewhere allows the answer to come to us from “the shadows” of our mind.

            I’ve applied this often in conversations.  Someone is telling me a story and gets stuck trying to remember a name.  They get frustrated when they can’t come up with it.  I’ve learned to say, “Just keep telling your story and it will come back to you.”  Almost always, when they resume their story, the fact will come to them and they’ll say, “Oh, now I remember…”

            During COVID, I took some Zoom writing classes from Marilyn McEntyre.  One of them was called, “Writing Into The Unknown.” Marilyn told of being in graduate school and meeting with a professor to receive a paper he had graded. He told her it was flawlessly done. “But,” he said, “it’s boring.” He encouraged her to take more chances.  She realized she had always depended on using outlines, knowing exactly where she was going when she started to write.  This can be useful in some situations. But it can be an impediment in creative and personal writing.  She encouraged us to start with a hunch or a feeling and see where it goes. Often, we surprise ourselves by discovering insights we didn’t know were “in” us.   Moving away from the lamppost can lead us to the key.

This resonates with the book In Praise of Walking,[ii] which I wrote about some months ago. If we have been working on a problem at our desk and feeling stuck, it’s well worth our time to get up and go for a walk.  As our attention shifts away from the problem, interesting ideas often bubble up to the surface of our awareness.  What we’ve done is give the unconscious/shadow part of our mind a chance to share what it’s quietly been working on all along, and it rarely disappoints.

In recent years, I’ve become more aware of “somatic intelligence” – the capacity of our body to know things that our conscious mind hasn’t figured out yet.  Sometimes we “get a feeling” about someone or something and we’re not sure where that comes from, but the feeling/thought turns out to be valid.  We use our rational mind to evaluate what we are feeling, but we do so while recognizing we may know more than we can say and be open to the unseen within us.

Let’s go back to the photo of the tree.  At first, all my attention was drawn to the lower half.  Here’s what the upper section shows:

A very different look from the lower half.  And the more I look at it, the more mysterious and interesting it becomes – so dense with intertwined growth representing years of making its way in this canyon.

            Here’s the original photo, with the illuminated parts of the tree integrated with the shadow side.  Together, they form a whole:

May we appreciate the different aspects of our personal awareness as we navigate the wonders of this life.

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[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect#cite_note-1

[ii] https://drjsb.com/2022/04/16/the-gift-of-walking-everyday-problems-electric-toothbrushes-and-an-easter-surprise/