We Inhabit The Same Universe, But We Live On Different Worlds [re-post; updated]

We drive a Honda Accord, a nice car, but one for me that is a wee bit problematic on occasion. Oh, nothing wrong mechanically with the car; rather, it’s the way the car fits me.

I’m a tall guy (6’1”).  Even with the driver’s seat as far back & as low as it will go, my eye level is above the mirror & lower edges of the sun visors when they’re down.

This means I have to hunch down to look under them in order to see out the windshield whenever I’m driving into the sun in the morning or evening.  In effect, they block about 1/3rd of my forward vision, and from my height I can only see a few dozen yards ahead of me.

My wife, conversely, is 5 ft tall.  Her eyes are well below the visors & mirror.  Her forward vision is unblocked.

We drive the same car, but at times under identical conditions it’s far more irritating to me than her.

Years ago I was taking a professional evening class at UCLA; one of the other students was a woman I’d known professionally for some time.

She would ask me to walk her to her car in a brightly lit parking lot on campus.  I wondered why she was so afraid then it dawned on me, she was only an average size female, I was a big guy.  I wouldn’t make the first cut in the victim selection process; any mugger looking at me would just let me pass and instead look for someone smaller.

Like a woman maybe 5’7” at most and certainly nowhere near my body mass.

The parking lot was the same structure for both of us, but to her it was a vastly different place than it was for me.

I listen to people whose judgment I respect discuss politics & theology & philosophy and what I hear from them is so blatantly at odds with what I see and know as true.

What they see they know as true, but they are filtering it through the spectrum they have available to them.  I have atheist/agnostic friends who view organized religion* as horrible and destructive and cannot fathom how any good comes from it.  I have political partisan friends who cannot see how their party has contributed to the mess we’re in today.

We all have blind spots so insidious we are not even aware we have blind spots.  And, yeah, I most certainly am including yrs trly.

© Buzz Dixon   

*  As I’m fond of telling people, anyone who fears organized religion has never attended a business meeting at a Baptist church.