Being the Future: creativefacilitating.com Blog

Breakdowns/ Breakthroughs/ and Focus

June 9th, 2010

I was reading a nice article from the Newfield Network coaching program in which I am swimming about those sudden breakthroughs people have when the routine they are in is suddenly not routine and the immediate future must be something other than what we usually anticipate.
I suddenly thought of an interesting experience I had when I was in Napoli (Naples, Italy). I was experiencing the Museo Archeologica Nazionale, considered the most important archeological museum in Europe. After all, Pompeii, Herculaneum and Rome are all there in Italy, bringing together the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.
Except for the few words of Italian I could pick up from my guidebook and interactions, I don’t speak Italian. I do know something of the Romance languages from a semester of Latin and several years of French and the fact that I speak English and have been an intentional student of languages. I was going through the museum with my taxi driver who had never been to it before. I was trying to really absorb what I saw. One time I commented on the eyes and the expression in a particular sculpture. My driver told me that the Italian tag on that exhibited called attention to that same thing. I felt happy at that.) As we continued through the exhibits, I tried to make sense of the cards I looked at with the items, using my observation skills and struggling to find the recognizable word roots from the Italian and make sense of what I was seeing. Sometimes my driver was next to me and could interpret. Sometimes he could not interpret because his English did not extend that far. And sometimes we were at different displays. I struggled through, amazed at the ancient artifacts. At one point I was facing one of those stand alone vertical sign explanations of the next phase of the exhibit. I continued to apply my struggling sense-making to it and was 2/3 of the way through it when I realized I was having an easy time of it, that in fact I seemed to understand all the words! At that breakthrough moment I was able to realize that I had just been reading English! No wonder I understood it all. Prior to that aha! moment I was focused on relating to the exhibit items themselves and content to struggle with my meager sense making of the language to understand how these objects had been used. With that in the forefront of my mind I did not realize the superficial format of what I was reading. In Gestalt terms, the figure for me was the meaning of the things I was observing and the ground (background) was the language in which explanations were written. When I had my aha! moment and understood both the figure and the ground I was able to read the last third of that long sign with ease and comfort.
The experience astonished me. It might even sound incredible to you, but please believe me— that’s exactly how the experience unfolded. It does reinforce for me the idea that a narrow focus can be important in penetrating the information that is there, and that a narrow focus can miss the context. A moment of awareness of other perspectives or more information about a situation can hep us view it more completely and generate new possibilities for us. Once I knew that English was occasionally used in this museum I could seek it out elsewhere to gain better clarity.
Breakthroughs happen all the time in many contexts. Sometimes as innocuous as the one I described, and sometimes so profound as to reveal how unhappy we have been or how our own voice has held us back. Whenever they occur, with whatever emotion they bring, breakthroughs are occasions for new discovery and fresh possibilities if we attend to them.

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