perspective

As I get older, my whole life perspective seems to have ratcheted like a telescope, widening its angle to reveal more of what's going on.

It's kind of like that scene in Blazing Saddles where the movie bursts its seams and the camera pulls back to reveal that the whole thing is actually on a movie set. Only in our case, the camera pulls back to reveal that we're all just one big consciousness that has been squeezed individually into these bodies that we travel around in. And then these bodies have a mind of their own, quite literally. And think of all the teeny tiny (and also gigantic) little intricacies of the mechanics of these bodies, and how one tiny little thing - from a common cold to a the food you eat every day to how much sleep you got last night to your unconscious memories of traumatic events to something that you're allergic to in your own home -  can affect the whole system and how it works and responds every moment. And then think of that one big beautiful infinite consciousness squeezed into these very finite bodies, all of us running around and bumping into things and fighting ourselves and each other because our telescopes are all so ratcheted down to focusing on the minutiae of just getting by.... well, it just kind of seems like a waste of a lot of valuable consciousness real estate.

Once you have a moment of seeing that, it gets harder to see the world as just full of annoying assholes. Instead, we all start to just look like we're doing the best we can (even if some of us really look like we're stretching the definition of the term "doing best we can" or are even aware that we're doing the best we can.)

That's kind of how I've come to see Truman. Here's this fabulous consciousness, that for whatever reason, has been squeezed into a body where the chemistry is off. The brain misfires and sends wrong signals and clouds his perceptions. The consciousness is still in there, but how the body sees and interacts with the world is skewed. The brain is so stuck in being worried about how scary bees are and running the obsessive loop over the ultra secret hidden level of a video game that it can't feel that there's more in there, and that if it that more, whatever it is, could be harnessed with a clear space in the brain that it might be a quite glorious result.

I see those clear spaces sometimes. I guess the trick - if there is a trick - is to stitch those moments together enough for him that he's able to ratchet out his own telescope as he gets older.