Centimeters apart...

Have you ever closed one eye and quickly switched to the other, back and forth, to see the ever so slight change in perception between the two? Have you ever noticed that you close one eye when you are measuring something because using both just doesn't seem exactly clear?

Mere centimeters separate your eyes yet when looking out the window of a plane, each eye has a bit of the image that the other doesn't. Each has its own view, and if you look at it just right, you can see there are two different images. Which is correct? Which centimeters of the image are "correct" to include in the view? Which view is more true? Does it matter?

As I walk through airports and sit on planes, it makes me wonder just how many people there are out in the world. Airports, the great mixers of culture, people, and baggage, place random people who would have never had any contact with each other in close quarters. Thousands of different perspectives, millions of unique experiences flowing in and out of one another's lives. Accents, languages, clothing, awful smelling cologne... inevitably infiltrate the senses, facilitating exposure to the new and different or sometimes the old and familiar. A new fashion statement, a familiar language, an old friend, or a different food -- all can be found in the airport amongst the thousands of clusters of experience trying to figure out where baggage claim is and from which gate their next flight is taking off.

Each of us, each and every single one of us, carries a unique never-before seen experience of the world through our own personal set of eyes, influenced and formed by a life no other person has lived. Some may have lived remotely close, coming from the same country, speaking the same language, or even coming from the same family, but still they do not hold the unique lineage of experience I embody as I awkwardly step off the moving sidewalk, trying to remember how to walk on a non-moving platform. If even our own two eyes see the world differently, imagine the diversity that exists between people.

Yet, seemingly paradoxically, we are not individuals. We are integrated, even integral, to everyone around us. We are dependent on them and they on us. I depend on the passengers in front of me to enter the plane in an orderly fashion so that I can more quickly sit in my uncomfortable seat. They depend on me not to scream as loud as I can mid-flight because my feet are so damn cold. My family depends on the pilot to do his job safely and effectively, and he depends on me to buy a ticket to fly across the continent.

We are interconnected, all of us. Pervasively influential and essential to one another, flowing, sometimes more smoothly than others, through our ever changing trajectories of action. In some situations we make minor adjustments to our ways of doing: shifting in our chair, popping our ears on a plane, drinking a liter of water before going through security because we forgot about that rule and we don't want to waste it. Other times we rearrange our entire way of doing: speaking another language, wearing different clothes, driving on the other side of the road, in order to co-exist alongside the many others like us in the world, holding in tension the me and the us.

What an exciting yet frightening thought.
I see the world like no one else, yet I am inextricably tangled and inseparable from it. The power to be so uniquely influential, yet the bearing weight of all the expectations and cultural norms that form me. The fantastic opportunity to learn and grow from the billions of unique perspectives out there, yet the challenge of discovering and asserting my own as valuable.

It can be quite overwhelming sometimes to try and sift through it all, to understand the complexity of the way we all work, to see the clarity and the obscurity in the perspectives of others. But maybe, if we take the time to realize how many different perspectives are out there, just for a moment, and actually close one eye and try to look at the world through some of them, we can begin to see what each perspective offers and what each is found wanting.

What if I take a moment each day to remember that even my own two eyes
see the world in two different ways, even being only mere centimeters apart?