There is remarkable machinery at work within us.
It requires no instruction.
No conscious decision.
No invitation.
A stimulus arrives.
Something stirs.
The machinery whirs into action.
Much of its work happens before we even realize anything has changed...
The other day, I came across a video. A woman with a kitten perched atop her head, the two of them caught in a moment of irresistible sweetness.
Oh, isn't that wonderful.
I read the caption. A foster kitten.
Oh, so sweeeeet! She's so niiiice! What an amazing person!
Then I read the kitten's name:
Cigarette.
And something changed.
Cigarettes are poison! Smoking kills! YUCK! Cigarettes are BAAAD!
All of it, summoned in less than an instant.
The kitten was still adorable.
The woman was still caring for it.
But the name had collided with something in me, and the experience shifted.
Here comes the machinery:
Before the discomfort could even be met, blame was ready with its offering:
How could she give such a gross name to such an innocent little kitten?
And there it was. The shield. The deflection. The immediate conversion of discomfort into fault.
She was wrong.
Her choice was the problem.
She had somehow become responsible for what I was feeling.
It happens so fast!
A word touches an old belief. Discomfort arises. And the mind, rather than meet that discomfort, directs its attention toward the apparent source.
A culprit is found.
The finger points.
The machinery keeps turning.
But the discomfort is still here.
Blame hasn't dissolved it. It has simply redirected my attention away from what was happening in me and toward what was supposedly wrong with her.
The messenger has been accused, and yet the message remains.
How often does this happen without our ever seeing it? How easily blame can feel like truth, especially when we've learned that uncomfortable feelings are something to escape or that someone else must be responsible for them.
Something hurts.
Someone someone did this to me.
And so we leave ourselves to prosecute the world.
But this time, I saw it happening.
Look at that.
My mind was making her wrong so I wouldn’t have to look at what was happening in me.
She can name her kitten anything she wants!
The interesting question wasn't what was wrong with her choice. It was why the name had affected me the way it did.
An old belief had been poked, and my mind had rushed to explain the discomfort by making someone else the problem.
But the belief didn't become true because it was activated. And the discomfort didn't need to be fixed by changing something outside me.
The woman hadn't done anything to me. A word had touched something I was carrying, and I had the opportunity to see it.
This is what becomes possible when we recognize the machinery at work. We don't have to condemn ourselves for the reflex or pretend the feeling isn't there. We can simply notice when blame pulls our attention away from our own experience.
We often assume the world makes us feel the way we do. But our experience is shaped by what we bring to it, including beliefs we've carried for years without ever questioning them.
What if discomfort isn't a verdict on the world? What if it's an opportunity to see something we hadn't noticed before?
The machinery may keep turning. But we can learn to recognize its work without automatically following where it leads.
A woman.
A kitten.
A name.
Cigarette.
Nothing out there needed to change.
There was simply something here to see.