Nothing is actually obvious until you’ve been shown it. It’s only after reading or being taught something do we say: “well, that’s just so obvious.” Let’s just make it really clear – it wasn’t that way until after we’d read it, or had been taught it. Oh, but NOW…! well, how bloody obvious!

The thing about the obvious, is that teaching it – and simply because of it’s nature – obviousness leaves no impression. However, if we allowed ourselves to be influenced by this – to the point we give up showing or saying it – ignorance would prevail.

Now, the reason something is obvious, is because it’s easy to learn. It’s easy to learn because it’s already there; already there but only at an unconscious level. Take the example of a man who beats his wife. We know this is mainly driven by fear, yet it’s not until someone – who we perhaps see as an authority on the subject – points it out, do we truly get it.

It’s as if the understanding, just pointed out to us, was already within our grasp: we knew it, but didn’t know we knew it. This doesn’t diminish its power though. If anything, it makes the ability, to point out the obvious, invaluable to us all.

Someone or something ‘needs’ to have made us aware, of what was previously an unconscious understanding, before it becomes fully conscious, and consequently obvious. “Man you’re just so obvious!” Well fuck you! Conscious enough for you?

As a further example, consider someone who works in the reptile enclosure at the local zoo. As bizarre as it may seem, this individual actually has a deep hatred of reptiles, yet dutifully gets out of bed each morning, in order to tend to the stinking reptiles he so loathes.

After years and years of doing this job, he begins to find it increasingly hard to motivate himself, and get out of bed in the mornings. After some further time – to really get his pain and suffering to intolerable levels – our reptile carer decides to get some outside, objective assistance, to improving his health.

How odd – it may now seem – that we should need to point out, doing a job we hate, will, in time, make us unwell? Crazy isn’t it? However millions of us are doing this very same thing every day! How bizarre is it that so many of us should feel like we have no choice? Our reptile keeper had been thinking to himself: “well, this is what I do, I look after reptiles.” How about, ‘fuck the reptiles man, go out and get a fucking life!’ Obvious? It is now.