Where am I? In today’s society, in winter, in America with its glories and shortcomings, in the midst of a forest of books, movies, magazines and web sites, in this family, where am I, just now? Is it where I want to be?
I have a blog post in the early months of this blog that mentions the physical views and ‘places’ that people live in. Just confining our thinking to this one planet, we still have spheres and places we inhabit: the bottom of the atmosphere, in the hydrosphere, where there is top soil and plant growth or their produce. But we can focus on many other views of humanity: the family and its influence, the current complex sphere of media and communication of all kinds from hand-written notes and letters to web sites and wholly owned tv, radio and newspaper conglomerates. We can focus just on sports, games, puzzles. Maybe just on politics in many different levels from the UN on down. We can put our selves into all sorts of made-up situations and worlds and when we do so mentally, we might find ourselves entering the astronomical body called a black hole or stopping on the surface of the sun, when we know we could be actually be there and stay alive.
One reason older people can just sit in apparent quiet is that they mentally visit so many different places, scenes, locales and they can do it through memory so that they travel about in time as well as space. We can sit and do thought experiments in which Grandma, who never saw an iPad or visited a foreign country, walks down the Champs Elysee or visits Shanghai. We can mentally put Uncle John on his mother’s porch talking to the newborn his grandson and wife just brought into the world when in fact, the former was dead before the latter was born.
You may have heard of thought experiments which have been put to good use in physics and astronomy. With the experience of years and with more or less clear-eyed understanding of human nature, we can often transport ourselves to places and situations involving people that would not or could not have actually been in that time and place.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
