the meanings we breathe onto things.

Yee Hung recently blogged about the meanings we give things; cancer could either send you into depression or could inspire you to winning the greatest biking race few times over. How true that how we see things is the way we breathe meaning onto them.

A Y-shaped twig was simply Nature's litter until someone felt that it could be the basic structure to build a catapult to destroy the enemy's walled cities. A single object, a single act or non-act can mean different things to different people. This is because each of us has a unique perspective.

1. There are different ways to see things.

1. Each person has a unique perspective.

Therefore, each person has a unique, and likely differing, way of seeing things.

Even if that difference in the way we see things is very small, it is still a difference nonetheless. Given it is inching close to 3am in the morning with my next exam in a day, I will make this brief.

This reflection has made me come up with possibly 2 musings:

(1) Because everyone has a unique view of seeing things, we must always be eager to listen to others and their views. Because no matter how convicted on something, there is always something you possibly you may have never thought of, a perspective you never knew existed. That's why some splashes of paint on a white canvas can be what my nursery teacher may have said as "untalented child" and can also be Pollock's rise to international stardom as an artist.

(2) Because we give meaning to the things around us, it seems there is no objective "truth"; each of us has our own "truths". And because of this, it is so difficult for us to be so firm that our interpretation is always the right one and others have the wrong one. Sure, theirs may not be right, but that doesn't mean yours is right either.

As I said in (2), I could be totally wrong here. I could be totally right. What say you?


Uncle T