I'd been thinking a lot about moving forward today, even before I heard the news about the Columbia Space Shuttle. I know the two items aren't linked, but like so much about the human endeavor, lines of thought and existence merge and converge. Whatever you call it, be it irony or happenstance, it always seems to me to be a punctuation mark, one upon the other.
Last night I had dinner with L, a delightful new friend. One of the most interesting things we talked about is how we, as human beings, are in the world. We talked about how our perception of everything around us is colored, textured and interpreted by our experiences. How we interpret everything we experience through a prism of our own construction. How someone looks at us and we interpret it through, all at once, our own anxieties, our past experiences and our own preconceived notion about ourselves and our surroundings.
That's how innocent remarks manifest into personal attacks in our minds – no matter how innocuous their beginnings. ``You look nice today'' grows into an indictment of our management style in a matter of seconds as we roll it around like a pinball between the way our parents treated us, the way a second-grade teacher made fun of our shoes and the parting shot our spouse made as we went out the door three weeks ago next Sunday.
L's point was quite profound to me: our expectations for the future, too, are bound by our expectations. In essence, our past acts like a mold into which we inject our future. It's a pre-shaped shell that we hope to someday fill. They are boundaries outside of which we may not grow.
That made sense to me on such an organic level that I really was struck by its simplicity, and by how profound it was. And just how true that is in my life.
I know how true that has been today as news coverage of this tragedy and the loss of seven courageous astronauts. Everything was filtered through past events. Was it a terrorist attack? Was it like what happened to Challenger? Was this an attack on the first Israeli astronaut?
That's not to say it's a bad thing to remember our history. Through history comes context and comprehension.
It's important to remember our past. As the sage said – those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
Perhaps it's also true that those who refuse to let go of history can never escape it.
Just some food for thought.
More soon.
Last night I had dinner with L, a delightful new friend. One of the most interesting things we talked about is how we, as human beings, are in the world. We talked about how our perception of everything around us is colored, textured and interpreted by our experiences. How we interpret everything we experience through a prism of our own construction. How someone looks at us and we interpret it through, all at once, our own anxieties, our past experiences and our own preconceived notion about ourselves and our surroundings.
That's how innocent remarks manifest into personal attacks in our minds – no matter how innocuous their beginnings. ``You look nice today'' grows into an indictment of our management style in a matter of seconds as we roll it around like a pinball between the way our parents treated us, the way a second-grade teacher made fun of our shoes and the parting shot our spouse made as we went out the door three weeks ago next Sunday.
L's point was quite profound to me: our expectations for the future, too, are bound by our expectations. In essence, our past acts like a mold into which we inject our future. It's a pre-shaped shell that we hope to someday fill. They are boundaries outside of which we may not grow.
That made sense to me on such an organic level that I really was struck by its simplicity, and by how profound it was. And just how true that is in my life.
I know how true that has been today as news coverage of this tragedy and the loss of seven courageous astronauts. Everything was filtered through past events. Was it a terrorist attack? Was it like what happened to Challenger? Was this an attack on the first Israeli astronaut?
That's not to say it's a bad thing to remember our history. Through history comes context and comprehension.
It's important to remember our past. As the sage said – those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
Perhaps it's also true that those who refuse to let go of history can never escape it.
Just some food for thought.
More soon.
posted by wurdsmith at
3:11 PM
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