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How’s Life in Your World?
That’s a question I regularly ask my friends. As they keep pointing out to me, I know we technically live in the same world (planet earth, usually — although it’s sometimes hard to be certain), but our experiences and perspectives on the world can be so drastically different that they seem like different worlds.
As a seafarer, it doesn’t help that when I’m ashore I feel like I live in a semi-permeable bubble: I can see and interact with the world, but I feel slightly disconnected from it. When I’m at sea, the bubble is solid.
I stood outside with a close friend. He pointed at the sky. “What’s that?”
I looked up. “It’s a cirrocumulus cloud.”
He gave me a long-suffering look and explained patiently, “Not the cloud, the bird.”
Another friend is an artist. I have very little affinity for or appreciation of anything to do with art for the sake of art. When she looks at something, she sees colours and shapes, shadows and textures; I see safety and maintenance issues and start running a mental assessment of how to fix the most obvious problems. We’re in the same world, but we definitely don’t see and experience it the same way.
When I read the news a few years ago and saw that America had elected Trump, I immediately started thinking about how that might affect the stability of…
