How we view the world

A couple of posts back I wrote about the tragic death of my friend Mehrdad. This obviously caused me to think a great deal about our relationship and the time I spent with him. In the midst of all that I had, I don't know what you would call it, a revelation, a thought, something.

I was on my way to pick Jared up from school and I rounded a pretty severe turn when I saw a rather beat-up big ol' honkin' sedan coming the other way. Something was off about the image I was seeing though. It was like I was looking through a camera that was being held slightly off from square, the car had a 10 degree list to the left. I literally shook my head to clear what I thought were cob webs from my brain. The image remained skewed. I shook my ahead again and this thought began to occur to me.

This is gonna sound crazy but I have been called crazy before. For seven years, I spent August through November, looking at Mehrdad in a football helmet. Every day for four months for seven years that's I saw him. And everyday his helmet was crooked, slightly off from square, like he just got tackled and his helmet got knocked askew but that's how he looked from the minute he walked out of the locker room to the minute he took off his helmet. I had been spending so much time thinking about Mehrdad that the image of him and his crooked helmet was once again present in my mind. In that moment, silly as it may sound, I believe, my perception of the oncoming car was impacted by the time I spent with Mehrdad.

We view life through a lens; more like a series lenses. You know the kind when you go to the eye doctor and they slide that contraption in front of your face and the doctor asks is the eye chart easier to see on number 1, or, he slides a lever and changes the lens, or number 2, back and forth, between the two lenses, 1 or 2. The lenses that we view life through are the people with whom we come in contact. For better or worse, if we spend any significant amount of time with someone they will affect the way we see things.

The image of the car being slightly off was not necessarily deep or meaningful other than it was happy reminder of my growing up with Mehrdad. I guess the bigger a-ha for me was that the way we see life is impacted, to a greater or lesser degree, by those around us. The other side of the coin is that we impact how others see the world.

So, who is impacting your world view? How are they impacting it? Who would you like to see have a greater impact on your world view? A lesser impact? Maybe harder to answer, whose world view are you impacting? How are you impacting it?