Hidden in plain sight

I have two lipsticks which I love, one a rich red and the other a more sedate browny-gold. Getting ready to travel up to London and work at a training seminar of NLP diploma candidates, I began the hunt; where is the lipstick I need!
I spent as long as I could afford before it was necessary for me to catch the train. I gave up, the lipstick had vanished, so I wore the other one, but continued to think about where the favoured one could possibly be. I began retracing my footsteps in my mind from the last time I used it, to the last time I could remember having it. No joy.
In the end, work over took thought, and the lost lipstick left my mind.
Several days later, I was looking once more for the same lipstick, when I stopped, and re-looked in the place where it should be. There, hidden in plain sight, was the lipstick, the only difference was, it was facing the other way round, so didn’t have the visual clue I was used to looking for. I had presumed what to expect and had filtered out the possibility of there being another view.
I sat and worked with a student who had thrashed around with a piece of mathematics for several days and had got no-where.
With a great flourish, he re-explained his method and all the alternatives he had tried, each one becoming more protracted until with complete satisfaction that it ‘could not be done’, he leant back in his chair and challenged me to find the solution.
I pointed out he had missed a minus sign in the question, hidden in plain sight.
Leaping forward he scrutinised the question, threw his hands in the air and said, “How did I miss it?”
Amazing how we do, but we do, and in that gap drops a lot of information which, if we has noticed it, hidden there in plain sight, it could have helped us or even made us rich.
In Napoleon Hill’s book, Think and Grow Rich, he talks about a man who, whilst in the deserts noticed a piece of gold. Mr Darby recognised a piece like this could mean more so quietly he went and collected what he required and began a hunt in the area. Very quickly he found enough to make it clear there was a possible gold strike and buying the land he sunk a shaft. He found a profitable vein and followed it down making him a very wealthy man.
One day the vein seemed to stop, and sinking all his money and as much as he could borrow, he sunk the lot into drilling machinery to find the vein again.
To cut a long story short, Mr Darby failed to find the other half of the vein, but what was hidden from plain sight was the geological evidence of a fault line which had shifted the other part of the vein three feet further down than he drilled.
Mr Darby went away broke and dejected, selling all he could to recoup his money.
And the gold vein? Well the man who came a long and bought the gear (and land) got a geologist in.
He was advised to drill a little further and there, three feet down was the vein, making the junk man, the owner of one of the largest gold mines in Colorado.
Hidden from plain sight was the greatest gold strike of its time.
So we can lose objects, we can lose fortunes, we can miss read and we can miss hear, but we can also fail to hear altogether.
If we do not see what we expect then do we see what is there at all? Like the leaf which looks like the injured bird, we make presumptions from not only what we know but also from what we expect.
If we don’t expect a pleasant comment from someone do we hear it when it comes?
So too are our goals and wishes. If we want something to happen do we expect it to come at us in one way, following only one route, and do we miss it because the way we see it is unfamiliar and therefore not expected?
Is it like the lipstick, right under our noses but not as we expected it to come?
Or are we so wrapped up in the finding and the procuring we haven’t realised a small error in the original plan which is preventing the whole thing from rolling out in front of our eyes?
Or do we have everything we could possibly want right there, just a matter of a few feet away as long as we have the courage to keep going for that little bit longer?
As the saying goes, everything we could possibly want in life is there, hidden in plain sight.