Planning- Day 2

Today’s song: The First Single (You Know Me) by The Format

It’s really unfortunate that we spend our entire lives inside our own body. 

No, think about it. Take thirty seconds and think about all the things that are specific to you, all the challenges that you face because of who you are, trapped in your own body. Think of your limitations. Think of your opportunities. Think of how the world thinks of you. 

Now, think about how your life would change if you weren’t in your own body. The world would see you differently if you had a different color hair, different color skin, different gender, different abilities, different brain, different chemistry. Maybe that’d make things easier for you. Maybe it’d make things harder. But it’d definitely be different and those differences in our realities are what make living with other people so hard. It’s difficult to find your place in society when you can’t really understand where all the people in society are coming from. Not completely, anyway.

I know the limitations of my body and my brain. I might flagrantly disregard those limitations from time to time, but I know them. I know the prayers I have prayed over and over again for direction. I know by rote the arguments for and against every career path I’ve considered so far. I know the hurts I harbor, the wants I ignore and the ones succumb to, the worries, the fears, the hopes, the dreams. I know that I have this deep-seated sense of purpose, even though I don’t actually know what that purpose is or what purpose means.

What I want is to spend a day in someone else’s mind, just watching. I want to see how someone else thinks, to understand what’s going on in there behind the filters they put up for other people. I know what’s inside my head and I know how hefty my filter is. Are other people like me? Am I normal? (Is there a normal? Probably not. But there have to be things we share, right?) I want to see the big picture of the universe and then see how I fit into it. I want to know if there is a big picture of the universe, or if I, like everyone else, just have to find my own place in it. I want to see how that problem looks from a different set of eyes, and then another, and another, until I have enough different points of view to make sense of the elephant. 

This is why I love books. They drop you into someone else’s mind. And this is why I love television shows- after you’ve settled into the characters, you get to see what the writers think, how they view these fictional people you’ve come to love, how they set up situations to prove a point to you and to the characters. Same with movies. This is, coincidentally, why we need diverse books and TV shows and movies- we can’t walk around in someone else’s skin for a day and so we need to be told the stories that expand our horizons, that challenge our ideas, that make us see the world through different sets of eyes.

I think that in order to figure out what I should do with the rest of my life, or where I should aim myself anyway, I need to get over myself. I need to see myself like the world sees me. As I learned from this epic article on Cracked, the world doesn’t really care that I’m a nice person. It cares what I can do for it. And I think I can do a lot of things for it and I just need to start doing. 

At the same time, it’s not like I’m sitting unemployed on the couch. I can choose where I go next. I want to maximize what I can do for the world. To do that, I need to see the world and to see where my skills fit in. 

So what about you? Are there books, TV shows, movies, articles, blogs, pictures, paintings, anything that helps you see the world more complexly? Anything you’d recommend? I know that it’s a life-long process, this learning about others, but I might as well get a big dose of that now.