Blind To Our Own Blindness
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
We walk through the world
believing ourselves perceptive—
curators of certainty,
cartographers of meaning,
naming each thing we see
as though language were ownership
and recognition were comprehension.
But so much of life
moves in the periphery,
in the soft, unlit corridors
beneath what our minds can hold.
We mistake familiarity for wisdom,
pattern for truth,
confidence for clarity—
never stopping to consider
how many symphonies have played
beneath the threshold of our hearing.
We are creatures of assumption,
trained by the architecture of ourselves—
by our histories, our fears,
the quiet inheritance of all we never questioned.
We stride forward, convinced we understand the path,
when in truth we only trace
the thin, worn circle
of what we’ve already seen.
How much we miss
because the unknown unnerves us.
Because ignorance feels like failure
when really it is a doorway—
a beckoning, a widening,
an invitation to surrender
the illusion of expertise
and become students of the world again.
We guard our convictions like heirlooms,
polished and fragile,
shining them for anyone who will look.
But a conviction is only a mirror—
and mirrors, by design,
cannot show us what stands behind us,
or what waits just beyond
the reach of our limited light.
Perhaps the greatest wisdom
is not in knowing,
but in admitting how blind we are—
how small our lantern-glow truly is
against the infinite dark.
And perhaps the greatest act of courage
is to keep walking anyway—
hands outstretched,
eyes unarmoured,
heart willing to be surprised
by all the beauty, all the wonder,
all the truth
we did not yet know to seek.
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Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe:
