My three best friends and I were inseparable growing up. Everywhere I went, they went. I can hardly think of a single adventure I had as a small child without these three friends in tow. We each had our own personalities that blended seamlessly to make an unstoppable team. Martin was the oldest and took care of the rest of us. Dave was my age and was constantly getting into and creating all kinds of trouble. John was the baby of the group, and followed us blindly into every crazy adventure. And I was the fearless leader, for good or ill.
Martin, Dave and John were, hands down, my best friends growing up, and it didn't bother me at all that I was the only person who could see them.
Don't get me wrong, I had plenty of friends whom I had not invented, but that did not make them any more or less "real" than Martin, Dave and John. The thing about these so-called imaginary friends is that they were the perfect reflection of those qualities in myself that I would grow up looking for in my future "real life" friends. Imaginary friends and make-believe worlds are not harbingers of some dormant mental instability. They are a promise that, perhaps, one day we might meet someone new or travel to a new place and recognize a little bit of ourselves in the experience.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
The Human Element
The angle of the incident light equals the angle of the resultant light. The color perceived is the total spectrum minus the absorbed wavelengths. The focal length is the inverse sum of object and image distances.
These are just a few of the basic properties that govern the way in which we are able to see our world. And yet there is so much more than these physical phenomena that occur when one watches a sun-set, inspects an ant in a magnifying glass or looks in the mirror. There is also the sense of the utter vastness of life and our own relative puniness one feels when faced with a horizon painted in every color imaginable, the weight of our own responsibilities when we truly see the small and vulnerable, and our own image staring back at us in the glass. This extracted element of the human perspective cannot be explained by the laws of physics, but is just as universal as any of Maxwell's equations.
Connecting to the world in a metaphysical way is part of the human experience, and is what drives many of our deepest desires. The desire to love and to be loved is rooted in our recognition that there is some good in this world, in others and in ourselves, and the desire to share in that goodness with others. The heart's quest to find and appreciate truth, beauty and goodness is the inspiration for adventure of all kinds, whether it is in the pages of a novel or in a far off land.
Imagine a world where a high-five was merely an application of Newton's second law of motion, where music's sole purpose was the study of Fourier wave function transforms, and where the beauty of a rose was simply a sign of healthy photosynthesis. While these physical properties are all an integral part of the world in which we live, they are not the sum total of our experience in this world. The natural phenomena will continue ad nauseum, but without engaging in the uniquely human experience of life we will miss out on one of our most basic and universal callings: to seek out Truth, Beauty and Goodness in every place where it is to be found.
These are just a few of the basic properties that govern the way in which we are able to see our world. And yet there is so much more than these physical phenomena that occur when one watches a sun-set, inspects an ant in a magnifying glass or looks in the mirror. There is also the sense of the utter vastness of life and our own relative puniness one feels when faced with a horizon painted in every color imaginable, the weight of our own responsibilities when we truly see the small and vulnerable, and our own image staring back at us in the glass. This extracted element of the human perspective cannot be explained by the laws of physics, but is just as universal as any of Maxwell's equations.
Connecting to the world in a metaphysical way is part of the human experience, and is what drives many of our deepest desires. The desire to love and to be loved is rooted in our recognition that there is some good in this world, in others and in ourselves, and the desire to share in that goodness with others. The heart's quest to find and appreciate truth, beauty and goodness is the inspiration for adventure of all kinds, whether it is in the pages of a novel or in a far off land.
Imagine a world where a high-five was merely an application of Newton's second law of motion, where music's sole purpose was the study of Fourier wave function transforms, and where the beauty of a rose was simply a sign of healthy photosynthesis. While these physical properties are all an integral part of the world in which we live, they are not the sum total of our experience in this world. The natural phenomena will continue ad nauseum, but without engaging in the uniquely human experience of life we will miss out on one of our most basic and universal callings: to seek out Truth, Beauty and Goodness in every place where it is to be found.
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