i spy

Becca and I rearranged the living room yesterday. It was an exercise in stick-with-it, because the imminent danger was that we would discover nothing could actually fit any other way and instead we would have rearranged (for two hours) our way back to the original configuration. In the end, however, it happened. It looks fantastic. Furthermore, the possibility of a three way collision between person A walking in, person B sitting at table, and refrigerator door being opened, is now gone. The idea is so decadent I can't even deal. Luxury!

Now that the table is in a different place the view out the window is different. I was sitting there, brewing some tea, and happened to look up. Usually I look out the window either straight and get a view of some some highly suspect back door of a place whose front I can't find, or towards the left, up and over some rooftops towards the capitol. But today I glanced up and saw something completely new. Which is crazy, because we have lived here for seven months now.

I think about this phenomenon often, actually. It happened one time while I was bus-ing to work at the hospital, and I sat at the very back in one of those seats that faces each other and run parallel to the bus sides (those are always kind of awkward when filled with people all trying to look past each others' faces to the windows behind). Anyway, we drove past the place where the marching band practices, and I suddenly saw a perspective of Madison that I couldn't ever remember seeing before: looking back over the practice field, over the Nat, and seeing the capitol in the background.

It doesn't sound that mind-boggling now, but at the moment that these things happen it's like a physical snap. Because it is incredible that we can go about our lives everyday, passing the same views, seeing the same sights, but changing it just the slightest bit can bring about an entirely new experience of something familiar. That makes me wonder, how much of the world do we miss because we don't make that small change--we don't sit on a different side of the bus, look out a different side of the window, or look up as we pass by a building and see the angles of the roof, the light's pattern on an overhang, something completely new.

It's as if a blind opens in a room you thought you knew so well. Every moment such a thing happens reminds me that human perception is a product of our non-foolproof minds. Especially since I don't believe in an objective reality, I think these moments are critically important: to remind us our reality is constructed, and therefore we can see, or miss, many things, and that we have the ability to look a little differently or harder. Maybe even more than the ability, maybe we have the responsibility to do so--to rearrange our sight every now and then.