I’m a fairly practical person, or so I tell myself most days. I try to reason through life, using logical approaches, common sense methodologies, and generally trying to be fair and just. However, I am realizing more and more that this is really my own perception of what is fair and just within a reality that only exists in my head. What I see as a natural outcome may seem completely irrational to someone else. My clearly delineated, step-by-step decision making process may seem perfectly convoluted to you. Coming to this realization has changed my perspective in a major way. It’s brought a new awareness that is, for me, exciting and engaging in a way beyond facts and figures. And don’t get me wrong, I love a good fact and drool over juicy figures. But this is more personal and more difficult to comprehend. It’s a challenge that will never end and that is what is so exciting; it is limitless possibility. It’s my own personal reality.
Until recently, I worked as a historic preservation professional. In this line of professional work, the idea that a place has an identity, like a person, is fairly commonplace. Generally it is not related to a stated slogan in a tourist brochure (welcome to the Lemon Verbena Smoothie Capital of the World everyone) it is a sense of place that is almost intangible. Truly authentic places envelop you in a unique identity that you can sense but perhaps not fully describe. It’s made up of history, people, events and the interconnection of these things to larger histories, people, and events in other towns, maybe in other states or areas of the world even. Each connection may be shared with another place, but the collection of connections is unique. We try to understand this sense of place through development of a historical context that identifies the major historical themes, important people, and influential events for a place and the connections that these elements have to other places. Contexts are never simple, but they are essential to developing programs and methods to protect and celebrate the uniqueness of each community.
People too have their own contexts. They each have a unique history, encounter different individuals, have adventures and tragedies, and experience life in different ways. Each moment shapes how we see and interpret the next. It’s a combination of nature and nurture. We are each born with an individual brain and hardwired with neural connections that can predetermine some aspects of our personality. My son is a morning person. Always has been. My daughter is most decidedly NOT a morning person. Never was. It has nothing to do with our morning routine or any particular approach to starting the day in our household. It doesn’t matter where we are. He will wake up first and she will linger in bed until hunger forces her into the kitchen. Hardwired. But we add to these differences the experiences and emotions of our individual lives. The result is a construct of the world that is all our own. We really do live in our own little worlds.
The first sense of the power of perception I had was when I learned about the physiological factors that dictate our interpretation of color in Biology 101. Wavelengths of light hit the back of our eyes and are detected by the nerve endings in our retinas. This sends a signal to our brains. Variations on the signal are interpreted as various colors. But if you are color blind, you don’t see certain colors. The kicker is that you don’t know the difference until something causes you to question your reality. Taken to a philosophical extreme, who is to say that what I call red, what I have known my whole life to be the color red, isn’t somehow green to you. We may both call it red but what we actually mean by that term could be quite different. I’m coming to understand that life is like this in so many ways: we say the same thing but mean something very different.
So in the posts on this blog I want to explore some of the things that interest me and the connections that I make to other things that interest me. Maybe it interests you too. Maybe it’s a waste of your precious time. In either case, you will have learned something new, so on to the adventure…
Pardon the interruption, but... 