Different Shades

Once, during a neighborhood pick-up game of basketball, my friend said “You know everyone sees color differently, right?”.  I have no idea what the context of this was, but I remember nodding along, filing this random fact away in my brain and telling him to check up. I would think about it in passing  from time to time after that, never going deep.However, for the past couple of years I’ve begun to think that this innocent fun-fact might explain more than just disagreements on color.

Maybe it can help to explain how people move through this world. If every experience is filtered through sets of eyes that perceive so differently, is it any wonder that at times we struggle to agree on what we are looking at?

In my science class this semester we are discussing Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle”, which questions the ability to obtain objective knowledge, positing that objective observation isn’t possible. What a person observes is directly dependent on where they are in reference to the action. This holds, so far, for science and I think it is true for life in general.  Our perceptions of the world are colored by our experiences. While our perspectives on events will never line up entirely, the fact  that the event took place is undeniable. This reminds me of  the story of the blind men attempting to describe an elephant-each of them was correct. Their descriptions were more incomplete than wrong.

The common thread through Heisenberg’s principle, the story of the elephant and my friend’s fun-fact is that they necessitate the admission that we may not have all of the answers.Someone else’s perception of reality is no less valid than my own. How we view and engage the world is a product of our lived experiences, everything we see is filtered through that prism.

I don’t know why my neighbor felt that this random fun-fact needed to be shared in that exact moment, but I have heard that statement over and over again at various points in my life. It has become a layer to the glasses through which I interpret the world.

I think that now more than ever, it is important for us to recognize that we all wear these glasses, the lenses of which have been altered by our experiences. These glasses allow us to perceive parts of our environment clearly, but they also blur some things. When we elevate our point of view as the only point of view, or only choose to acknowledge facts that leave our current pair of glasses untouched, it can be a serious problem. However I think the fact that we all view events in slightly different shades is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. If we combine our varied viewpoints we may discover a much more complete picture of the world. A viewpoint grounded in the stability of facts and enriched by the beauty of millions of experiences, shades of the same colors,  coming together and intertwining to form a beautiful, more  complete mosaic.

2 Comments

Young Jedi posted on January 26, 2017 at 8:08 pm

“When we elevate our point of view as the only point of view, or only choose to acknowledge facts that leave our current pair of glasses untouched, it can be a serious problem.”

Thank you, I needed this. Great blog.

– Young Jedi

Nick Rodriguez posted on January 28, 2017 at 1:56 am

This this this this this. This x 1000. I love this blog post.

Thank you, this is something I feel many of us, especially myself included, need to reflect on more often.

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