The other night before I went to bed I was scrolling through my Facebook feed when I saw a post from a group called Do You Remember?
You’ve probably seen them on your feed too. They show pictures from old TV shows and old products and TV commercials and then you get a little nostalgic. Well, the picture was of the old TV game show The Hollywood Squares and when I looked at that picture. I remembered every one of those names. Mind you, I was probably in about the third grade, but the names were people I hadn’t heard about in a long time, like Charlie Weaver, Paul Lynde, Rose Marie, and Sandy Duncan. When I saw Sandy Duncan, I started to think about her.
I remember her playing Peter Pan and her having really short hair. I also remembered that my dad told me she had a glass eye. So, wondering if she was still around I did a Google search to find out. Turns out she is alive and well.
The ironic thing though, is that Sandy Duncan never had a glass eye. When she was 24 she had a brain tumor and was having problems with her optic nerve in one of her eyes. The surgeon tried to fix it and ended up severing it, which means she was blind in that eye. Since that day, she’s been operating with just one eye, which makes it challenging for her depth perception but that eyeball in the socket is her real eye. No prosthetic.
Now, you’re probably wondering why I wrote a blog post about a glass eye. First of all glass eye is probably a term you wouldn’t use anymore. We would say prosthetic eye wouldn’t we? But the bigger issue is why in the world do we believe some thing our whole lives when it has no base or no merit? When I was a kid I thought whatever my parents told me was gospel. It wasn’t untiI got older than I realized, I could think and research and do for myself. It was then I discovered that many of the things I believed, growing up were in fact not even true. They just were real in my experience because I THOUGHT they were real. How did my dad know she had a glass eye? Someone probably told him. When more people think you have a glass eye than don’t, you can clearly see the power of communication can’t you?
So back to you. What has been something you have said or thought to be true over the years that you’ve never actually checked into? It may be something simple and strange, like Sandy Duncan’s glass eye, but it might be something more serious. Maybe the way that you look at others. Maybe the way that you make your decisions. Maybe your values. Have you ever stopped just to ask a question of why? Maybe this week that’s a good goal. Take a look at what you’ve already believed your whole life to be true without ever checking. Just for fun, double-check it.
Who knows what new insights you might discover this week!