We are so familiar in western culture with the concept that we should never ‘judge a book by its cover’ or assume anything based on appearances that it astonishes me how often we still fall prey to such foolishness. We are so taken with externals and what we assume based on them that it’s amazing we’re able to function on a day-to-day basis without getting smashed like bugs under the weight of our own dimwittedness and the resulting misguided things we do and don’t think–more importantly, what we do and don’t do as a result of those thoughts. How many times do I have to wish I could re-train my presumptuous inclinations away from predetermining what I think of any given situation or person! In reality, what looks like either a foreboding or inviting doorway is nothing more or less than a closed door until I go in through it with thoughts and eyes wide open, to see what really lies on the other side.I’m thinking of it at the moment especially, I suppose, having seen our pretty, healthy and cheery looking mothers have invisible health reasons both to undergo their surgeries and to worry and/or hurt enough to be willing to undergo surgery rather than just continuing to ‘tough it out’. Neither is a complainer, though thankfully they’re not big on hiding the truth from us beyond probably softening their descriptions of the various medical struggles they’ve undergone over the years nor are they avid players of the martyr game. So I think it’s safe to guess that most people would readily think both of them something nigh unto indestructible, and perhaps they are in spirit if not quite in body. Yet here they are needing to get ‘repaired’ from time to time. It’s a little like those industrial sites that to me look so beguilingly, alluringly palatial and mysterious and exotic the way they’re lit up at night but when in operation during the day are simply hard at work to keep the business intact, bits of their well-used machinery breaking down occasionally as they gradually work their way toward a point they can’t finally pass without reconstruction.I’m also thinking such thoughts as I live surrounded by family and friends who struggle with innumerable unseen barriers to easy living, full health and happiness. There is the poor student who works long hours at both academic and full-time jobs to get through her education but is harassed for being a ‘spoiled fashionista’ because she looks so perfectly turned out in her work and school clothes. If anyone paid attention, of course, they’d know that the two perfectly kept outfits she wears on alternating days are ones she scrimped to save less than $10 each for from top to toe at a thrift store on her minimum wage income. There is the boy who is bullied by his peers as being a lazy wimp because he doesn’t go out for the soccer team, though any of them who asked might find out that despite his looking so fit he has severe juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and would be in mortal agony if he even went out for a practice. There is the ‘weird old guy’ down the street that everyone avoids, thinking him creepy and dangerous with his long hair and eye patch and spooky twitch, never bothering to get close enough to discover that he always keeps himself very clean and neatly dressed and runs a small watch repair business out of his house to sustain himself despite his torture and mutilation in his war-torn home country and being too much an outsider to get fine language training once here because people were too displeased with and put off by their imagined version of him.Bad enough that we assume the worst about so many people and things and fail to discover whether there’s the tiniest bit of factual basis for any such assumptions. The worst is that we may never know what treasures lie within if we don’t make a real investigation. Besides all of those complications of health (mental and physical), circumstance (familial, economic, educational, political) or any number of invisible ‘companions’ that often make it simply miraculous that a given person lives what looks to others like even a marginally ‘ordinary’ life, most people have within them amazing and distinctive forms of unique beauty–talents, passions, depths of character, and just plain reserves of love welling up inside–that we should be avidly seeking to bring out in each other at every opportunity, not to avoid or repress or let be defeated by their personal barriers and boundaries. Least of all, to lie forever undiscovered because we looked at externals and assumed there was no such treasure hidden there.