Look see. An interesting expression that. Sort of a request (or sometimes an urgent command) for a given individual to look. Followed, one could say, by an urge to see once one has looked. See what the person speaking wants you to see when you look.   Perhaps wishing for you to see what they have seen. Maybe with some hope that you will understand why what you are looking at is worth seeing – the significance of it – the beauty – the rarity – the portend.   Hard though to see how another sees. Looking seems to be pretty doable. Seeing is a very different matter. The same could be said of listening and hearing.   The challenges of looking and seeing (or listening and hearing) are generally made even more difficult the closer one is to what one is looking at. Closer not in physical distance but rather in the sense of familiarity – something so close that one is very much a part of it. Hard to actually see what one looks at all the time or hear what one listens to too often.   That is, for example, if we enter a place and experience the dynamics within it as a stranger, we can see and hear much that is revealing about what is there before us. We may not understand it (or believe we do) like someone who is accustomed to that context, but because we don’t, we can see it is an unusual kind of high definition. We can consider both the whole and the parts as they are, with few assumptions about what they are envisioned to be, the inhabitants of that place/time. We wonder about the what, the why, the how … and the why nots. We have so many questions, and as we consider them, we do so assuming that there are answers and that those immersed in that context know what they are. Why they value this and not that. Why they have chosen to act in this way and not that. Why what they seem to do doesn’t always align with what they say they wish to do – what they assume they are doing.   Indeed, it does so often seem surprisingly easy to have all sorts of ideas about how to remake the operative contexts of others – yet so very hard when it comes to one’s own. Perhaps it is that seeing problem.   If, as the quote on the cover of this card says the task (the tasks if one wishes to discover anew – to make meaning rather than have it handed to you – to see possibilities not yet seen) is “…to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everyone sees”, then those inherent challenges associated with looking and seeing the realities that stand in front of us (perhaps a bit too close) every day are essential.   Undoubtedly hard to reimagine – to create – to solve – if one cannot see one’s own reality with some new clarity. Similarly hard to understand the remarkable range of possibilities woven into what is there before us – in the world woven around us – unless we undertake the somewhat daunting conceptual challenge of learning to see and to hear anew. It does require a lot of thinking about what one may have long been allowing to just be a “given” – a part of the stage set of one’s day. It likely also requires the help of others with an authentic desire to learn, to see what can offer a greater chance for tying together what each sees when they look into something increasingly empowering – increasingly clear enough to reveal what is and what is possible.   In a time when it is so easy to feel that nothing can be done to impact the big and seemingly disconnected (from us) current reality (which manages to be both vast and fixed and, oddly enough, so easily pushed in one direction or another by wills and forces beyond our own – beyond those near us), looking and seeing and listening and hearing to the substance of one’s own day (the people, social structures, organizations, moments, beauty, bodies of knowledge, and more) become an even more urgent task.   Tasks that are the keys to choices and actions that shift the possible – that allow a place for hope and impact on the reality we actually experience – that allow one to change one’s own world – the communities (large and small, defined not just by place but by idea, aspiration, and shared sense of what can/should be) within which you (and those many near you) actually spend each day and moment of your life.   Look and see. What is right there – today – close – in front of you. Can we start with the place and time in which we actually live each day – the world we do impact every day with what we do and what we don’t do – what we see (and don’t see)? What we determine warrants our creative time and energy to reimagine, reshape, and engage. What we actually talk about in the conversations in which we participate (structured and unstructured – formal and informal – smaller and larger) and how often those tie to what we deem the most important – at a more profound level.   Can we build/refine our ability to look at what is close to us and see it afresh – viewed as if a stranger in some important ways – and, in turn, ask a lot of reflective questions about our modes and structures – what if and why not? To shift what we see as possible – meaningful – necessary. Do we really understand the responsibility we have because of the rather vast scope of what our allotted time, talents, context, insights, and ever-changing capabilities might allow us to do – what differences we could make in the life of another in a given moment or our shared world by the seemingly small choices we make and what we do?   Doesn’t actually take moving the whole to expand the possible a heck of a lot (at a world-changing level – that close world) – just moving some of the interconnected parts will do it. Our parts? Now is probably good.

California State University, Northridge Tseng College: Graduate, International and Midcareer Education January 2026 Note: Milton, featured on the cover of this card, resides in the offices of the person who wrote this card.