Perspective

I’ve heard it said before that so and so lives in their own world. It’s a way of identifying the outlier, the odd man. But I’m beginning to think we all live in our own worlds. We pop into existence, try to learn how things work, then pop back out. It brings to mind the fable of the blind men describing an elephant by touch. That’s us when we’re alive, trying to make sense of the world. Someone sings a song. One person loves it. The other person hates it. In your own universe, it’s to each his own.

As we struggle with learning how things work, we try to fit together with like-minded souls, but even when we find some, it’s never a perfect fit. If no two snowflakes are alike, it’s an even better bet that no two humans are alike. But we’re enough alike in some aspects that we think we’re alike in all of them. So, we marry, have kids, have friends, live our lives, build societies, and pretend we’re all living in the same world.

Where this is all heading is to my change in thinking about my life as being non-linear. For me, this is that moment in a car when the person next to you moves forward and you pump the brakes because it feels like you’re going backwards. I’m not moving in time; time is moving around me. And all the things I’ve done and all the people I know and have known are still in my universe in whatever form to which they’ve now progressed. Some are held as memories, some are real. And everything is a matter of perspective.