Perspectives

Something that fascinates me and will be important in my posts is that we all experience the world differently. And by we I mean all living things. I have my own experience, sensing the world with my senses and processing the data my senses produce with my brain. Your senses and brain are different, maybe not that much but enough to produce your unique experience.

Lately I have found it reassuring to consider how blessed we really are to have all these different perspectives. Taking a slow walk through the city of Amersfoort with my wife, we enjoyed the medieval part of town with me thinking about those who build, lived and worked in the buildings we passed. How they experienced the world and how they used their experience to shape the city we now take care of and change for the future. Visiting various centres of art, I considered how different artists share their experience with me and help me see more of what is out there. Sure, some works I liked better than others, but I also reflected that others might have a different preference and are enriched in their experience.

Appreciating the complexity of life more than I did at a younger age, I find that there is really no way to learn to understand the world and yourself except through the varied perspectives we all have to offer. There is no point trying to learn it all and understand it all myself, I just need to do my best to explore my perspective to the best of my abilities and share it so it may help others. You might be surprised, but this realization really feels like a relief to me in my never ending quest to know and improve.

Our human perspective is not enough, though. Other beings have different senses and different brains, and will experience the world wildly different (probably, there's no way for me to know for sure 😊). I think theirs is a crucial perspective on the world and ourselves as well. Without it, we have gaps in our understanding of both. As a kid I always marvelled (I still do, though not quite as intensely as I did as a child most of the time) at the plants and animals in zoos and documentaries, their strangeness and their beauty. They made me value the world much more. As I grew older this sensation started to dim, which was such a loss! It took a lot of study, thinking and maturing to move beyond the rationalistic world view I was adopting fitting in at school and society and rediscover this feeling of wonder and connectedness.