Outlook

The other day I was talking with my boss while driving around Staten Island. As is our usual habit, we were deeply entrenched in the business of solving the problems of the world and the human heart (with lots of philosophizing thrown in for good measure) when a new-to-me way of thinking about the differences between people came up.

It seems to me that people fall into one of three groups. The first group is comprised of ungrounded dreamers. You know the sort- they go through life with the belief that everything is perfectly fine the way it is. It's not that they see the best in things so much as that they don't really see the things in front of them. They live in a dreamworld. This is really a rather small group, as it's pretty impractical to live everyday lost in thought, pondering what it would be like to fly south with the geese for winter.

The second group is full of people who live in today. Sure, today is a little miserable, it's kind of cold actually, but it's today. Tomorrow's not here, and hey- it's just going to be another version of this miserable day (which thus far is indistinguishable from yesterday), so why think about it too much? And when life throws rotten fruit at you, well, that's life. You keep doing what you've been doing. It's not as though things could be different. No one's ever truly happy, and besides, you didn't want to be happy anyways.

The third group is filled by those who dream of possibility. These people live in the world today, but they do not accept that this is the way life has to be. They imagine that their hopes could become realities, and then they make them happen. They interact pragmatically, but they are always considering that the life they think about while waiting for sleep could become their reality.

It's true that no one lives their entire life solely in one of these groups- we all dabble in all of these outlooks from time to time, but I think it's fair to say that most people spend the majority of their day-to-day lives in one of these modes of reality. I'm sure I've neglected some other group(s) in the process of creating three boxes for every individual to fit into, but my point is not to create a highly tuned system for filing people away. Rather, I think it's helpful to realize this particular difference in the ways that people approach their reality.

For example, I think I spend a lot of my time in the third group. I'm happy with my life for the most part (despite the volumes of complaints this blog is collecting) but I'm not content to sit back and passively live in the world. I want to affect change, both in my personal experience and in my community. I have dreams. I have hopes for what my life will be. And I find it incredibly frustrating to spend a lot of time with those content to live their life in the second group. To interact with people filled with potential, filled with dreams of far off happiness, but lacking the agency to begin any sort of journey towards those dreams. Content to be miserable. Wallowing in mediocrity.

Ok, perhaps that last bit was a bit harsh. I may have been thinking about individuals instead of pontificating about an entire group of people. . . (because one is so much better than the other. . . hmmm) but what I'm trying to get at is that it can be difficult to explain thoughts and actions to people who don't live in the same sort of reality. People who don't see the possibility of change, let alone believing in its possibility, have difficulty understanding why someone would spend hir energy trying to change things.

I'm not sure if I think this is fascinating or horrifying. It's pretty helpful when building new relationships to determine if the people involved share the same concept of reality. In my experience it's exhausting trying to convince someone else that ze not only has the right to dream or that hir dreams are possible, but that dreaming of the future is essential. Now that I think on it, I'm inclined to be more conscious of this when making new friends.