i was blind but now i see👀
Fewer words aptly capture the extraordinary human capacity to awaken to truths that have been in front of us all along.
But awakening is complicated and painful.
Even the language of awakening has become politically weaponized, turning an essential human capacity for discernment into a test of ideological allegiance.
The man whose words about blindness and sight was John Newton, a eighteenth-century English slave trader who treated human beings as cargo.
It was a profitable enterprise, defended by powerful interests and accepted by much of the society in which he lived.
He survived a terrifying storm at sea which upended his beliefs about his life. But it would take him decades to align those spiritual insights with moral action.
His prolonged blindness demonstrates how powerfully self-interest, livelihood, and accepted beliefs can interfere with moral clarity.
True transformation is more than an epiphany—it requires honesty and discernment to break through our own denial.
Consider this—our internal organs. They remind us of our biological equality. A heart is a heart, a liver is a liver.
So how did we come to regard facial skin—a tiny portion of a vital organ—as precious, while treating the rest as an afterthought?
Skin’s appearance, especially its age and color, has been marketed to dictate human worth, creating centuries of physical, psychological, and systemic harm.
Yet skin itself doesn't behave along the marketing categories created for it. It just functions as it was evolved to do: protect the inside world from the outside, help regulate temperature, participate in immune defense, and facilitate the experience of touch.
No one awaiting an organ transplant is concerned with organ aesthetics. What matters is whether it can sustain life.
Despite our extraordinary access to information, we remain vulnerable to unconscious biases and fashionable beliefs promoted by powerful companies and institutions.
This makes what we've been taught not to notice, our greatest blindness.
The Enlightenment, 'Age of Reason,’ has left us in a world we can hardly make sense of.
We don't need more data. We need a deeper intelligence—one rooted in connection that is real, natural, and human.
As Newton's story reminds us, seeing something differently doesn't necessarily mean we're ready to live differently. We easily rationalize our own blindness, so seeing is the first step.
The hardest part of awakening is examining where we’re treating human beings, our planet, and even our own bodies as “cargo.”
May we find the courage to examine what we've accepted, reconsider what we've overlooked and act upon what we discover.
Our communities, our institutions, our bodies, our skin—and our body politic depend on it.
