Friday Walk

I decided to walk around the ‘hood – my first walk since the storm (see previous post). As I started my walk I was thinking very philosophical thoughts. I was thinking about our personal realities and about the fact that everyone lives in a different world.

We’re born into a family, a neighborhood, a culture. The opinions, spoken and unspoken, of these various groups are absorbed by us at an early age. At some point we decide we know how the world works. We know what’s good and what’s bad, we know who is good and who is not, we know which idea is right and which idea is wrong. We have it all figured out. We’ve built a mental brick wall. The bricks in this wall are our ideas, our notions, and our personal “shoulds”, or rules of behavior. They’re mostly the ideas, notions, and rules of other people who have been important to us. The brick wall is not complete; there are plenty of holes where bricks are missing. Every time we encounter a new idea we test it to see if it fits a hole in our mental brick wall. If it fits, we accept it as not only true but obvious; if it doesn’t fit we reject it as not only false, but possibly a dangerous heresy. Accepting ideas that fit with our previously adopted ideas is a psychological phenomenon called confirmation bias.

So when we meet someone who has it all figured out very differently, we know he has to be wrong, and we don’t understand why he can’t see how wrong he is. So human-produced climate change is blatantly obvious; no, it’s a conspiracy. Guns should be regulated; guns should be unrestricted. Conservatives have the right ideas, liberals have the right ideas. Abortion should be legal; abortion should be banned. Our mental wall is impervious to logic; we’re all very sure our beliefs are true and must not be questioned. The only way to crack the wall is with an epiphany, like the vision that struck Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, or like the mind-altering state of consciousness produced by certain drugs or by isolation. Sometimes, love can crack the wall. But our mental wall is sturdy and our ego protects it as though our life depends on it. It is our reality; how would we survive without it?

We look at the world through cracks and holes in our mental wall. We get only a partial picture of the outside world. No one gets a complete picture of the world. My wall is different from your wall. My constellation of truths and notions and shoulds is different from yours. How could it be otherwise? We grew up in different families, in different cultures, at different times, with different needs and priorities. The reason we can’t agree might be because one of us is right and the other is wrong; and it might be that we can’t agree because we’re both right and we’re both wrong, too. Each of us lives in a different world and has truths unique to that world; we each live in a world filtered and colored by our own biases, perceptions, assumptions – our own unique mental DNA.

My philosophizing got this far when I turned a corner and encountered Amy raking her yard. Amy is a loquacious woman who works for the city’s Streets Department. I often see her driving a dump truck up my street. She told me that today she made six trips to the city dump to dump tree debris. I told her I had my camera with me in case I ran into an interesting sight. She told me I should visit a house where she used to live and gave me the address. It was only a few blocks away, so I did. By then it was almost 8 PM and dusk was approaching. A tree in front of the house appeared to be split in half, with one half of it resting on power lines. A section of the street was taped off with yellow police tape. I stood behind the tape and zoomed my camera to the downed tree. Wires were down on the street. Scenes like this are not uncommon around town today.

Walking back home, I encountered two young women walking in the opposite direction. They appeared to be age 16 or so. As we were on the same sidewalk, passing within inches of each other, I offered a friendly, “Hello.” Neither girl replied. One looked at me suspiciously while the other appeared slightly embarrassed. I don’t know why I bother speaking to children. Manners are a thing of the past. Or maybe manners have just evolved in some radical way so that I can no longer recognize them. After all, in their world they might consider simply not cursing at me to be the height of good manners. In the future I’ll try not to make people feel weird or uncomfortable by saying “Hello” to them. Instead, I’ll just stick to philosophizing while pretending I don’t see them. They’ll probably like that.