I’m thinking about the chicken and egg relationship between doing and being. Michael Chapman has been writing an article for the Barclay Press Conversation Café that will lead off a focus on “developing peripheral vision.” It has to do with seeing the people who are different from us—the ones we would rather not have to deal with. During the recent weeks when Michael has been thinking about and writing the article, he has picked up a hitch hiker, responded to a panhandler, seen how a handicapped child is treated as if she were invisible, and I don’t know the story yet on some incident yesterday. So is this some kind of weird mystical thing where things start to happen when a person starts thinking and writing about a topic? Does mental process naturally increase awareness and action? Does seeing and doing change who we are and how we perceive things?

The chicken comes before the egg and the egg comes before the chicken.