My brother and I used to go for a morning ride on the weekends, he on a very fast Ducati, and I on a more comfortable Harley. He would always land at our prearranged refreshment location far ahead of me, and when I would eventually arrive, I would have to hear his complaints about the time that he had to spend waiting for me, to which I would respond with something like, “how beautiful was that waterfall we passed” which would typically solicit a reaction from him such as “there was a waterfall?”.
If there is any theme to this blog, it is about the differences in perspective and how, depending on where we are standing, metaphorically, we come to understand the world. Now while we could suggest that it was the difference in riding position, the head down position on a sports bike versus the upright position of a cruiser, that was the cause of the difference in what my brother and I experienced traveling along the same path, I would suggest that it is more than that.
We can look at our formal education, the books that we’ve read, the things that we have come to know through experience, the understanding that we formed from those who raised us, or as some might say, we come with a predisposition to deciphering through an inherent nature that was given to us in our genetic makeup. Others ascribe to the belief that it is in how the stars are aligned when we first arrive on the planet and that we fall into one of a possible 12 characteristics, while others, such as the Chinese, provide an additional 5 elements that are considered in the zodiac makeup, some explain that our perspective is affected by the vibration of numbers, or that perhaps our outlook is colored by the experience of past lives lived.
In an interesting conversation, a friend once suggested that they could successfully partner with anyone except with someone who grew up on the opposite end of the socioeconomic scale from them; she said political and religious disagreement was manageable, but it would be impossible for two people to find any sort of common ground if one grew up in poverty, struggling for food and shelter, and the other grew up with abundance.
I’m not sure; I’m not sure what it is that colors our lenses, perhaps a little something of all of the above, is it nature or nurture, a result of chemical fusion, an intentional musing of the gods, or does it come from a Darwinian development that begins to form with our first memorable life experience. What is it that makes two people look at the same tree, and in describing it, one describes the leaves, while for the other, it is the space between the leaves that explains it best for them?
I agree to some extent that opposites attract; after all, I live in a Butchfemme world, and I relish being exposed to perspectives that are far outside of my own; I enjoy times when I can say, “I never looked at it like that,” but while I agree somewhat with my friend who said that it is the socioeconomic divide that is insurmountable (the morality of the different classes so beautifully portrayed in Shaw’s Pygmalion explains this best) for me, the hardest divide lays between the wordsmith and those with a disregard for language, with those who hear music and those who hear noise, those who see art and those who instead see a decoration, those who can smell a summers day with those who look to the calendar to discover the season. It is not the ability or inability to express the impact that the intangible can have on our senses that matters, but rather that it has an impact at all. The heart of a poet versus the heart of the literal would seem to be a difficult relationship to maintain.
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