Are all epiphanies obvious in retrospect? “Hindsight is 20/20″ we know, but not all hindsight invokes epiphany.
On my commute home I was allowing my mind to wander and was thinking about the events of the day. I have so many fires that I’m usually fighting, or at least so many things that I need to deal with that I rarely have time for in-depth thought. So that happens when I can’t be doing anything else – falling asleep, fixing meals, commuting and the like.
With my recent almost-done-divorce I’ve been directing my non-work and non-dad attention at social events. I’ve been able to get to a few of these lately and have quite a few more planned. (I suspect all my co-workers are happy about this; happy that I’ll turn my social brain on after work and stop bothering them about things I’ve been thinking about.)
One of the things I’ve been trying to focus on is paying attention to other people. There are a couple in particular that I’ve been observing and a handful more that I’ve started to. I had a tendency to evaluate myself continually and I compare what I see other’s do with how I handle myself. And I think that with being in such small groups that I’ve isolated myself into situations where everything is predictable enough that I’m not finding massively new attributes to adopt. Even when I’m not in small groups, I’m in groups of like-minded people and so I’m not exposed to a wide variety or diversity of thought and action.
Well, lately I have been and I’m finding a few areas that I can make dramatic improvements upon.
So I was thinking about this on the way home and it hits me like a ton of bricks – science fiction! OK, I’ll have to tie that together for you…
I love science fiction. I love the short stories, the novels, the collections, all of it. I love sci-fi that’s based in the past, the future, the present. I love sci-fi that’s heavy on advanced technology and sci-fi that’s light on technology but heavy on thought and mind-exploration.
As a kid I analyzed this and determined that the reason I loved sci-fi so much was that, as with other books, I was able to transport myself to a different world, live in the minds of different characters and that these other characters were wildly different. It wasn’t a collection of common humans but of extraordinary beings, great technological thinkers, inventors, etc. I felt that during a story I was actually part of it, living in the world that was laid out for the other characters there. And after every book I considered myself to be more. More of whatever. More adventurous, more cautious, more empathetic to certain situations, more inventive, more persistent, etc. I was expanding who I was by living in the minds and settings of the characters in the world of the book.
I had that thought as a young teenager and it’s never left me. So as I’m out meeting several new people (let’s see, at least 60 people among 4 different groups, each of whom I was introduced to or heard the “who I am and why I’m here” without distraction) I”m getting this massive influx of new experience.
For example, at one of the Toastmaster meetings there were 5 different talks and every single one of them contained detailed information about the speaker. That’s a lot of new incorporating of their experiences into my system for comparison and contrast. There were fewer talks at the next meeting but just as many introductions and discussions. A meetup group I attended on Monday had 30-40 people in a circle with introductions and “tell us a little about yourself” and then more than an hour of let-me-explore-who-you-are get-to-know-each-other games where a small group of 8 people I was sitting with were doing nothing except sharing details, albeit about short episodes, about their lives. And we were supposed to be able to provide details about each person at the end of the game so that increased focused attention. I *really* got to know a few people there. And then there was the after-event discussion for an hour between a subset of the larger group outside of my table group. And it goes on.
So I have this massive influx of new and incredibly diverse experience flooding at me from so many people.
It’s like eating fresh, nutritious and energy-filling food when starving. I can’t get enough of it.
I’ve read hundreds of sci-fi books and short stories and I’ve adopted attitudes and thought patterns for different experiences from them. But now I want to soak up the life stories of real people, those who are like me and those who are very different.
So far I’m finding that it’s making me “more”.
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