What men lack in sophisticated grace, they tend to make up for with brute force.

Reality

I think that I am finally beginning to understand a concept that has been introduced to me several times by several different sources. I am beginning to understand that I have the option to choose what I see or hear or taste or smell or touch. I get to choose my own interpretation of the world around me. We all have the option of choosing our own interpretations of the world. We get to choose what we see.

It sounds simple. I have to admit that I was completely sure that I fully understood this before now. I was not a ‘victim’. I was a very independent person, making my own decisions based on independent interpretations. Or so I thought.

I think my first clue came after I watched ‘What the Bleep do We Know Anyway’ which states that while we typically take in a few thousand bits of information about our environment, several million are available to us at any given point in time. I took this to heart and one day, while driving a route that I drive on a regular basis, I focused on different aspects of the environment. I was in a public park and driving slowly, so it was easy to focus on a variety of things other than just the road in front of me and other cars on the road. On this day, instead of giving my attention only to where I was going, I focused on the sounds of the birds, the trees, and the sky in the background as well as the road. The interesting thing was that when I got to a stop sign, which I stop at on a nearly daily basis, I had to think about where I was! I actually had to think about the direction in which I needed to go, left or right. I never had to think about it before, I just knew from years of practice.

For the sake of efficiency, I understand the value of having a pattern or process that informs the next step, but I also understand the value of challenging the status quo in order to see and experience new things. How many inventions would never have come to light had their creators not challenged the status quo?

Notice also that I did not limit my focus on the road ahead, I merely expanded my focus to include other things as well. I don’t presume to think that I can be omniscient or nearly so, but I wonder now how many things I can be aware of. I’ve often heard and talked about the ‘filters’ that people use to view the world. I understand the value of these filters, but at the same time wonder how they might be expanded. I wonder how my own filters might be expanded and what the effect of that expansion might be.

I’m not the most social person, tending to think of myself as a bit awkward and out of step with the rest of the world and subsequently uncomfortable in many social settings. This lack of comfort and its effect on my actions has often been a source of frustration for people around me and several of them have challenged my beliefs. What if they are right? What if I expand my understanding of the social experiences that I have? What if I expand the amount and types of information I take in while relating to others? What would be the effect of this change to that particular filter?

Statisticians tend to refrain from saying, “I know”. Instead they typically say, “I think”. And these are people who deal with large amounts of data using (hopefully) unbiased, mathematically based filters. I think I’m going to start using this practice of saying “I think” more and “I know” less, and I’m going to work to expand my filters in any way that I can.