unique perspectives

A brief history:

I started this blog a very long time ago. Back when I started to realize how little of the world I actually understood. Was the time of my life where I was learning a lot about myself and about the world and life in general. Been through some rough happenings that exposed my ignorance more than I was able to deal with. In my younger years I did not have the mental fortitude to admit to myself that I was ignorant. I screwed up a lot of things because of that one singular aspect of my personality. It's still part of me but I know it's there and I've learned to stop listening to it. I think I'm just a little bit more self-aware than I have ever been in my life. I wonder if that's what it really means to be wise. 

I started blogging because of a simple idea that was presented to me about keeping a journal. I never really did keep a journal. But I liked the idea of placing my ideas on a medium that was open to the world. I didn't care if a single person ever read anything that I wrote. The act of writing was the point. For some reason today I decided it was time to possibly pick this up again. I've toyed with the idea a few times over the last few years since I stopped. I think writing this blog made me a better person, and stopping has somehow made me less of what I could have been. We all have a self-image concept of what we think we are and it's tinted a little by what we want to be. I think the act of writing this blog over the years molded me to better match what I wanted to be. 

I lost sight of what I learned when I was writing. And ended up making some of them the same mistakes that I remember making before. 'Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.' The quote is taken a little out of context, but I think it applies to personal history and personal growth the same as it does societal histories. I deal with stress differently than I did back before I started as well. The same things that would affect my mental state don't affect me as much anymore. I don't know if it's again being more self-aware or the fact that maybe those things aren't as important as I originally made them out to be. So I think doing this writing will help me with quantifying my personal beliefs and be more self-aware. 

A story of perspectives:

My wife loves watching true crime shows. We've watched so many of them over the years, but I still cannot fathom what goes through people's minds that cause them to do the things they do. There was a recent one where someone was supposedly brainwashed into being accomplice in the murder of their own mother. It got me thinking about how a reasoning human could ever be coerced into believing that an action such as that was okay. I can grasp an idea that that in the heat of a moment someone might be able to get caught up in an event that led to the ultimate harm to another individual. However, after that moment passes reason should return and proper actions would be taken to report the truth. This is just the simple action of a reasonable rational individual person. The person must not have ever been a reasonable, rational person from what I see. But how can a person not be reasonable and rational. Maybe it's as simple as I didn't grow up like they did or maybe I have personal belief that I haven't quantified that prevents me from understanding something happening like that. Maybe it is just difference of perspective that I can't see. 

I once got accused of something quite horrifying because of contextual misunderstanding of perspectives. It was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life. That incident taught me that everyone has a completely different perspective of what is happening around them. Even though I now understand what cues caused the person to make the assumptions they did, I don't believe my own life experiences would ever allow me to make the same conclusions they did. I don't think I could ever intellectually and automatically make the same assumptions after seeing the same thing and react the same way. I do not believe any two humans will ever be able to truly understand the perspective of each other. No matter how much we communicate, no matter how much we put effort in to seeing what others see. Most of the conflicts in my life are because I forget none of us see the world's colors the exact same way. We all wear our own unique shade of rose colored glasses.