We may as well be living in different worlds.

     Today I was talking with a friend about the concept of concrete vs. abstract people, the idea that some people are more comfortable interacting with history, facts, and tangible realities while others prefer to interact with ideas that cannot be proved and systems that can't be observed. 

    The whole thing was very neat. It seemed to exist in a comfortable binary. But as I tried this system of categorization out on the people I know and love, I realized that some people fit strongly into both categories while others did not fit into either one. 

    In essence, even when we come up with ways to categorize people, two people who fit into the same category can be even more different than two people who fit into two opposite categories because the way we categorize people is more like a standardized descriptive language than an accurate way to organize humanity. 

    As I've observed people, the reality seems to be that people are more different than any of us is capable of comprehending. Conversations with most of my closest friends seem to make sense because we think similarly. But sometimes, when I talk to people, I come to realize that we may as well be living in different worlds, because their eyes see different things and their minds detect different patterns. 

    Conversation with one friend reveals a world in which anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Sometimes it does. In this person's world, things cannot be trusted to turn out alright. This perception exists both in her mindset and in her reality; she has anxiously anticipated a lot of scary things, and a lot of those scary things have actually come true. Her reality has confirmed her mindset. In this person's reality, societal wisdom is also largely useless. For every example she has witnessed where following the advice of elders has gone well, she finds examples of hypocrisies and failures that contradict it. 

    When talking to another friend, I find that she lives in this fascinating land in which everything makes sense and has a greater scheme. She has an ability to connect the dots between the realities she witnesses and the greater truths that those reality represents, and this ability has revealed to me that living in her mind is something like living in a C.S. Lewis work... The theology, not the fiction. Each interaction with each person carries a lesson, and if she cannot find the meaning, she finds meaning, growth, and moral in the process of searching for it. Her life and world are so brim full of meaning that it is almost unrecognizable from the one that I live in. 

    In my world, life is joyous for its very ordinariness. The world has its occasional pattern and these are thrilling, but truth lies mostly in the processes of cooking, folding laundry, driving to work, and greeting acquaintances. Everything worth achieving is achieved through steadiness and persistence. The world has a slow, slight warm glow. Nothing very exciting can be expected to happen, but neither will anything very disastrous. Meaning can be found but it unfolds slowly over time. While one of my friends lives mostly in his head, occupying his time with the theoretical, in my world life is lived in embodied processes, with time to theorize as a vacation whose solaces leak slowly into day to day life. 

    Our worlds are so different. It is so tempting, too, to only surround ourselves with those who occupy the same world because we feel understood. This temptation should be resisted. It is worth considering that, although these worlds are all in some way representations of reality, they also characterized in part by falsehood. For example, though my friend's perception that everything will go wrong is incorrect, so is my perception that nothing will go wrong. While my friend's search to find meaning in everything may lead her to construct fictitious meanings, it is also likely that there are many patterns and truths in my world that I am missing. The reality is usually somewhere in the middle, and when we spend time together, our worlds seep into one another. We have the opportunity to identify truths in the worlds of our friends that help us identify falsehoods in our own worlds. 

    This reminds me of a time in my life when I was struggling with mental illness. My world was not worth living in; I was in constant fear and danger, and this seemed to me to be the truth and the reality of what the world was. Because I felt that no one understood me, I isolated myself and this dark world soon surpassed the status of being my world; I had come to believe that it was the world. I had to be reminded that this had not always been my world before I could take a step back and recognize that the world wasn't always this dark, and that although my perception of the world around me was vivid and real, it might not be the only one. 

We need each others realities. They inform each other. They are not meant to be held in isolation. We have each been gifted with a different way to live, and these gifts inform and refine each other.