7 hours in a car tends to stir the thought barrel...

As the title suggests, I've done a lot of thinking and a lot of analyzing behind the wheel today. As driving is the one true passion in my life, today was not an altogether un-enjoyable day...I've had so many thoughts swirl in, out and around, I had to get on here and let some of this out...



Buckle up...the top is off and it's about to get heavy.



One of the consequences of living an existence in today's age of information is the inescapable curse of continually viewing the world through the focusing prism employed by a historian. I say "curse"--when in truth I believe it to be a blessing--because any hope of prescience requires a constant questioning of what is, and a deep-seated belief in the possibility of what can be. Viewing events as might the historian requires an acceptance that my own initial, visceral reactions to seemingly momentous events in my life may be errant, that my "gut instinct" and my own emotional needs may not stand the light of reason in the wider view, or even that these events, so momentous in my personal experience, might not be so in the wider world and the long, slow, inevitable creep of time.

How often have I seen that my first reaction is based on half-truths and biased perceptions! How often have I found expectations completely inverted or tossed aside as events played out to their own accord!

I believe this to be because emotion clouds the rational, and many perspectives guide the full reality. To really view and analyze the people around you is to account for all perspectives, from the loved ones around you, the friends closest to you, even those of your enemy. It is to know the past and to use such relevant history as a template for expectation. It is most of all, to force reason ahead of instinct, to refuse to demonize that which you hate, and to, most of all, accept your own fallibility.

And so I live on shifting sands, where yet more absolutes melt away with the passing of another year. It is a natural extension, I expect, of an existence in which I have shattered the preconceptions of so many people. With every stranger who comes to accept me for who I am instead of who he or she expected me to be, I roil the sands beneath that person's feet. It is a growth experience for them, no doubt, but we are all creatures of ritual and habit and accepted notions of what is and what is not. When true reality cuts against that internalized expectation--there is created an internal dissonance, as uncomfortable as the worst case of poison ivy.

There is freedom in seeing the world as a painting in progress, instead of a place already painted, but there are times my friend...

There are times.