it's all in your head

I walked back from lab today along lakeshore. It was crazy beautiful.

I find it really reassuring to look out over the lake, far off into the distance, and know that out there are people whose lives you have not touched or known. There's some generic house in some generic neighborhood and there's a car pulling into the driveway unloading the kids who just got back from middle school where one of them did a project in art today and wants to give it to one parent for a Christmas present and the other one has basketball practice. Or whatever. Something that has all the minute and overlooked details that living really entails. 

But in fact, to you, these people don't really exist--they're just conceptualizations. However there actually is someone out there, living, whose personal universe is as strong and real as the one you necessarily live in. So then, if you can conceptualize other people and other equally real people can conceptualize you, it becomes comforting (at least to me) to know that the view out of our personal universe is really just one out of many and fallible. 

I come back to this concept of personal universes really often. It's like one of the big socks that goes around and around in the dryer of my mind. I think that every person contains within them a universe. The universe, in fact. Not in some mystical ooooooo there's an asteroid in my heart way (sounds like an awful love song from the 90s) , but in the way that everything that physically exists gets represented and conceptualized in people's minds. It's  similar perhaps to how Plato thought there was a world where the true Things/Ideas existed and everything that we experience in this world is just a shadow of it. So we have the real universe (Pluto, bag of cranberries, electrons, squirrel...) extant out there and then these things get translated into people's minds (thought of Pluto, perception of bag of cranberries, imagining electrons, staring at the squirrel). Then, because there are seven billion unique views, if you're looking at something, or conceptualizations, if you're studying something, or whatever it is--then there are seven billion translations of the universe into people's heads. 

Take Pluto for example. However many people you ask about Pluto, the way they believe in it will differ that many times. Of course there will be overlaps, since most people who have education and exposure can say Pluto's a planetorcloseenough in outer space with very cold temperatures, Arnold from the Magic School Bus almost dies on it, and picture a grey cold ball or whatever image from elementary school people think of when they devote brain energy to the subject of Pluto. Anyway, so when/if you converse about Pluto, what you're referring to might look different from the way Pluto looks in the other person's mind and thus there are multiple Plutos. Expand principle. QED. 

Everyone walks around carrying their universes and looking out from them. It's kind of crazy. 

I'm happiest when I walk or sit and look at the earth. Isn't it wonderful when your eyes can see these rich things? I feel like my vision soaks sights up like some sponge cake and becomes saturated, then I marvel at how extravagant nature is, just carelessly tossing around sights like these. And they'll come again. And they'll come again..