Pondering Perception Again.

I had two encounters with the Lady B today, one passive (meaning she didn’t notice me as I stood a mere twenty feet away for five minutes) and one active (she spoke two words as she drove past me in the car.) I cast no hint of aspersion towards the said dear lady when I say it appeared to be a message from the universe, one rather more transparent than they usually are: ‘You are now an object of faded regard. Get used to it.’ (Thanks to Zoe Mintz for that excellent phrase, by the way. I wonder what she’s doing now. She was quite a star in my life for a couple of years.) Anyway, no problem: I already am used to it.

But I did make friends with a little girl making her way home from the kiddies’ party with her bike. She seemed a little wary of me at first, but I kept the contact on very low burn and eventually received the grace of a smile. And then all was well with the world again.

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Meanwhile, my current preoccupation is with one of my old hobby horses – that the more you examine the meaningful things in life, the more you realise that they all eventually distil down to the abstract. It appears that perception really is the whole of the life experience (and I sometimes wish that one day I might hear somebody repeat that phrase back to me so that I might have reason to believe that it has entered the lexicon of Well Known Phrases and Sayings. This is, of course, a bad thing to wish since it demonstrates that my ego still has life in it. But why should Zoe Mintz, bless her, get all the plaudits?)

And while I’m on the subject of perception, I want to make a point about all those times when politicians react to difficult behaviours exhibited by the homeless, the poor, the unemployed, and others in situations of disadvantage. They sit on their high horses and rain down the vilest curses on the transgressors. They use language like ‘audacious criminality’ and ‘they will be subject to the full force of the law.’ Do they not realise that the way people behave stems mostly from their perceptions, and that perceptions are largely generated by experiences, and so the homeless, the poor, the unemployed, and the disadvantaged see concepts like right and wrong, fair and unfair, acceptable and unacceptable, just and unjust, and so on and so forth, differently than the well-heeled politicians and others living in relative comfort. But they never take that fact into account when they’re passing arbitrary judgement.