Seeing the forest

I'm still in the midst of Stumbling on Happiness , so it is coloring just about everything that I see these days. At this point in the book, Daniel Gilbert has explained how our brain works when using imaginary input as opposed to external input. So, for example, you can't look at an ostrich and tell someone whether a penguin has longer flippers than feet. He refers to this as the "Reality First" principal. When your brain is processing visual data, you can't give it imaginary visual data to process as well.

He goes on to show that this also works for emotional information - like how we feel about our lives or futures. He quotes a study where people were asked to think about how satisified they were with their lives. The results turned out to be depent on how nice the weather was in their city that day! In other words, even when imagining just general life happiness, the Reality First principal overlaid most people's entire lives with that day's weather.

On some level, I think that most of us are aware of this. But you can see how well that works in the picture of the cello above. Though I could clearly see the shine of the cello in low light through the tree fronds, the camera didn't really get it. In the same way, I often forget that no matter how clearly I believe my vision to be, the factors that are not my focus can still impact the clarity of my picture.

I know myself well enough to realize that my own mental imagery is clouded in another way. I have a fascination with details. I can't even guess how much time I spent playing with different perspectives like this on Friday night. Suffice it to say that the hosting of our benefit coffee shop was largely left up to the rest of the band for long stretches of time. This can be a very useful skill at times - when given a "big picture", I can always find the pieces that I can do to advance that picture along - but it also means that I can get caught in a point of view that doesn't make much sense.

As always, I see an analogy in all of this. There are a number of factors, in my 9-5 (as if!) life, that are darkening my perspective on a job that I, for the most part, enjoy. I am slowly eliminating them in my "one piece at at time" way, so that I can lighten up my perspective.

In the big picture, this year is buying me and mine a good future. It will give us more control over the hows and whats that will impact the next stage of our lives. As HTH will tell you, the more controls that we have to play with, the better! Which is why, of course, he has a 20 channel board for a 9 channel band....