I'm looking at the ugly picture on the wall and wondering if it has any redeeming value. Having nothing better to do on a cold and rainy day I decide to take it down and put it into a new frame. I drive to the nearest store where I can find cheap frames with the picture tucked under my arm. I browse through the wooden ones, the plastic, the gilt, the aluminum. I look at frames, with mattes and without. I try to figure out what color matte will best go with the picture, and then have to decide on what color frame goes with the matte. There is a lot of thinking going into this and I'm not sure if the frame will improve the picture or if the picture just needs a new frame. I browse for so long that I am dizzy with the choices and still undecided. Reframing is hard work. Finally, I make my choice, pay, and head for home. I pry the old frame off realizing as I do so that the glass was hopelessly dirty - I never noticed. That sure didn't add to the beauty of the picture. I gently lift the picture from the frame and smooth it onto the matte and glass of the new frame. I add the backing and secure it to the frame. Voila - new picture! The ugly duckling is now a swan, or at least a lot better looking duck.
Isn't it amazing how often the picture changes from bad to good when it's reframed? I grew up with a boy who everyone in our class thought was ugly, he was teased all the time and no one wanted much to do with him. The summer after ninth grade he walks into school and he's reframed - his hair is longer, his glasses are gone, he's taller and thinner, his voice is deeper. By the end of the first month of school he is going steady with one of the cheerleader types and part of the in crowd. Everybody wants to be his friend. And what we find out is that behind that geeky little kid is this really gentle, nice, guy who has spent his years of exile practicing how to be a decent human being while we were all being dopes. Good for him.
We try to reframe things when we want people to accept them. The government has been searching for the right frame for Iraq since the beginning. First the frame was weapons of mass destruction, then it was Saddam the nasty, then it was all Iraqui's deserve a vote, and finally we are fighting a war for democracy in the mideast. That frame may well improve the picture or perhaps there will be more frames to come until finally most of us can accept the picture, frame and all. The frame we purchase is the frame that makes the picture look better. Is it a war of aggression or a war of liberation? Does the frame make what you see look better?
If you decide to visit a therapist you will be asked to reframe your thinking. The ideas and thoughts, that keep you stuck in that place you don't like being but can't get out of, are put into new frames. The words and thoughts evaluated, turned, smoothed and dusted off to see if they can be seen in a new light. You may start out feeling bad and then along the way you find a new way of looking at the same old thing and Voila - feelin' good again. And you happily pay for that reframing, for that better picture, because it's easier to buy the new frame than create a new picture. Or is that what you did - new frame or new picture? Our view, what we see, how we see it, is only as clear as the frame in which we view it. It's the old glass half full or glass half empty perception.
My picture is now hanging in a conspicuous spot on a prominent wall in my house and when friends come over they remark on the beauty of the new picture. And of course, if I say oh no, it's not new, I just reframed it, they look at me skeptically. They swear they never saw that picture in my house before and surely that frame, nice as it is, couldn't possibly be the reason that the picture looks so good. After all you can buy a frame just like it down at the cheap frame store for a few dollars. And you know, I think they are right, the picture is beautiful. It was my sight that was faulty.
