I heard a story this morning on the radio that got me
thinking. I am sure you have all heard the gross stories about hotel rooms.
When they test the bedspreads, rugs, etc they find residues of all kinds of
nasty stuff that I won’t share here so I don’t ruin your lunch. The scary thing is that even the sheets,
towels, glasses, coffee pot, and other items we interact with intimately are
not safe.
But we need to stay in hotels. So we have become pretty
adept at suppressing this knowledge, at least for the time we are in the room.
If we don’t think about it, it doesn’t exist. Just like the infant who doesn’t
know you are there when she covers her eyes.
In the story I heard on the radio, a couple found a
particularly nasty item under the bed in their hotel room. Again, I will spare
you the details. They demanded to be moved to another room. As if that one would be any cleaner !! The truth is that we can delude ourselves
into thinking the room is clean if we don’t personally encounter the
nastiness. When that “item” was forced
upon their consciousness, they had no choice but to accept it.
All they needed was to be moved to another room where they could
recede back to their self-delusional world where the room was clean.