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Closing our eyes to the present equals to disconnect ourselves from the future

Francisco Miraval

The story is told about a group of American business leaders who, representing the automobile industry, went to Japan in the 1980s to see what the Japanese car makers were doing to compete with American car makers. According to the story, the business leaders thought they have been deceived during that trip.

The deception, they said once they came back to the United States, was clear: they were never taken to car production plants. Instead, the Japanese took them to places prepared for the visit where they just pretend to build cars. They were just they were never taken to the actual car factories.

Why were the American business leaders so sure they have been deceived? They explained they knew they were not in a car production plant because they place was clean and almost quite in comparison with American plants. Also, there was no inventory, few people (comparatively speaking) worked there, and production was automatized.

Obviously, the business leaders were not deceived. They did visit real Japanese car production plants, but because those plants were so different from the plants in the United States, they were unable to recognize them as real factories. Instead of saying, “We are seeing something new to us”, they said, “They are deceiving us and none of this is real”.

Because they didn’t see the present, they couldn’t see the future either. They were unable to go beyond their preconceived ideas and they never expected the unexpected. They thought that anything not following what they accepted as normal was a deception and an illusion. A new reality was in front of them and they couldn’t see it nor understand it.

The same story is true today day after day in countless lives, minds, and hearts. For many people, schools, churches, offices, families, language, and many other things should be only the way they think those things should be. Anything that differs from those preconceived ideas it is a mistake and those who follow that mistake should be promptly corrected.

Even worst, they don’t realize that they are closing themselves to the future. They believe they have all the answers and, therefore, there is nothing new to be learned. Those who may have different answers or approaches are simply wrong. End of discussion. It is not that they want to go back to the past: they want to live in past and they want to stop others from leaving the past.

This is neither an abstract observation nor a theoretical complaint. I have seen many times the destructive consequences in the lives of all affected by somebody thinking like the business leaders did in their trip to Japan. And the consequences are even worst in the case of intergenerational relationships.

What prevents our minds and hearts from seeing the present and from connecting with the future? We close our minds and hearts when we base all our listening and understanding on information previously downloaded instead of listening and understanding from the sphere of the totality.

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