mamajoan

Pondering the quote I use in my .sig file at home: "Your focus determines your reality."

It's actually a line spoken by Qui-Gon to Anakin in Phantom Menace, which perhaps decreases its validity in many people's minds ;), but I took it because each time I see the movie and hear him say that, a little voice inside me is going, "That is so true." It's what makes, for example, witness testimony about a car accident so troublesome. Because you can never be entirely sure what really happened -- two witnesses can describe the same accident completely differently, yet each witness is telling the absolute truth for his/her own reality.

And it's kind of amazing how a little five-word phrase like that can have so much in it to think about. Like: "your reality." Do we each have our own individual reality? Yes, I think we do. And doesn't that mean there's no such thing as a "real" reality? An objective, universal one that applies to everyone? Well... eh, maybe. That's getting a little too new-agey for me. Some things have to be objective, have to be constant. I need to believe that. But a lot of things, things that we perceive or think, are subjective. Like something I used to wonder about a lot: if I look at the sky and say it's blue, and you look at it and agree that it's blue, how do I know you're actually seeing what I'm seeing? Maybe what you see is what I call yellow, but it's what you've always learned to call blue. So we think we're agreeing on the color, but really we're not.

And then: "Your focus"... I think of that as a literal focus (what you're looking at or thinking about) as well as a more abstract one, like a bias. In the car accident example, it's partly about where you were standing and at what point you noticed the cars ... it's also partly about personal bias (e.g. the back of your mind might be thinking "red sports car = asshole," or making an assumption about one driver based on race or age or whatever), and that's a form of focus too.

Guess I'm babbling because I don't really know what I'm trying to say. Well, okay, it's this: I think that in my world-view (my reality), more things are subjective and open to interpretation based on "focus" than in most people's world-views. Maybe this is why I'm wishy-washy on so many big issues (e.g. death penalty, gun control, foreign policy). I can see too many sides to the argument. Wouldn't my life be so much easier if I only saw the one side. Easier, but narrower.