February, 2023

I have no idea where we get our filters,
the perception sieve that tilts us
imperceptibly toward the way we see/interpret/comprehend/
understand/judge/determine/take things to be,
and away from different/better/worse ways of doing 
the same thing.

We look and see something different
from the way others look at the same thing.

A lot has to do with what we have at stake
in seeing things as we do.

The old "reasonable people can look at the facts
and draw different conclusions,"
suggests to me that the facts mean something
different to the "reasonable people"
doing the looking.

And that they see things based on the implications
their looking has for them and their lives.

Conservative people and liberal people
tend to see things as conservatives and liberals
and not as "reasonable people."

And so on through all of the categories of people
in the encyclopedia of categories.

Our perceptions are biased in favor of our perspective.
What we see when we look flows
from how we look at what we see.

We do not come objective and unbiased into the day,
any day.

We have a lifetime of experiences and preferences
leading us into all of our encounters
through all of the situations and circumstances
that arise in a day.

In the time left for living.

We see who we are,
who we have become
over the course of being alive.

We are going to be consistent 
with our point of view
which has been developed 
through the impact of life upon us
and the impact of the way we have reacted to it
from the beginning.

We cannot get outside of our point of view
to see things "as they are" ever.

However, we can be responsible for understanding
that how we look determines what we see--
and stop talking about "how things are,"
and start talking about "how we see things,"
and why we see things "this way and not that way"
and how "that is the way things are."

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