The world is nothing but my perception of it.

The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story. - Byron Katie
When I first heard this it pushed all my buttons, there is objective reality, things actually happen, not everything is my perception...

But the older I get, the more this feels true to me. 10,000 things happen around us every day, and what do we recall? what catches our attention? we seem to remember only the things that confirm our beliefs, give energy/attention to what filters through our story. It's true, objectively true. The death of our pet dog speaks to us more than that of 100,000 strangers. Do we remember that someone smiled at us on the subway, or bumped into us? Do we notice the bad boy or the sweet smile? We are filtering information every second, and who controls that filter? We can only see through the glass darkly. It is ironic that the more clearly we know that, the more we can see.

Kindling fears

Every so often when I switch on my kindle there is a pause, often no longer than a heartbeat, and then the machine decides to switch on. But each time it happens I create a dystopian future fantasy, where the satellites go down, the electricity is off, and we can’t even access the books to fix it, because there are no books, only these electronic versions, and power isn’t on.

It worries me this reliance on things in the ether - that we will have our version of the catastrophic fire in the Great Library of Alexandria, but in our case, it will be that the machines won’t switch on, and then where will we be? I’m surrounded by technology that I cannot understand. I never knew how a microwave works and don’t even know how a toilet flushes, what will I do if books no longer light up for me?

I think I’ll keep some basic text books on hand, just in case…

My year in facebook status updates

this is a new idea on facebook, randomly taking your updates and mixing it into some kind of text that sounds a bit like poetry... you might have to make the screen bigger to read it all, (really showing my age here!) but I like it...