Three o' clock in the morning thoughts

I think I learned everything I had to know
about relativity
about perspective
about seeing without judging
about listening without talking
about the folly of believing that our stations separating one another - placing us above, below, left, right of each other - are anything more than tricks of the mind

because

my grandparents' house had stairs with holes between the steps.

Really. That's the reason I learned those things before the first day of school. Certainly figuring them out and putting them into words has been the work of decades. But I learned them.

It became deep and pure and intuitive knowing. Waiting for me to understand it.

Because I liked to lie on my stomach and stick my head down and watch through the hole between the top and second stair. I watched the kitchen from above, in secret, in silence, upside down, as the adults drank coffee and talked amongst themselves. In my memory I even see them rightside up. I learned to think around the principles of gravity that bind our perception. I learned that clockwise motion is counter-clockwise if you look at it from below. Sometimes, thirty years later, I think so hard about these things I forget my left and right. Not because it's unclear which is which but because I'm uncertain which way I should look at them from.

The advocate for the political right, in general, looks down on those with less power than him and looks up to those with more. He imagines that everyone has the same freedoms he does, and removing as many restrictions as possible from society will allow everyone else to be who they want, do what they want and go where they want. The advocate for the left, in general, tries to look at everyone evenly, as brothers, and believes it is the duty of those with more power to look out for those with less. And I can look at both of them from outside and upside down and I can understand them both. I mean, I agree with the left, I think it's based on a firmer understanding of the power imbalances of the world while the right is based on a naive, idealistic, often deliberate blindness to other peoples' suffering. But I can see where they're both coming from.

There are no walls. There are no heights. They're just there because we believe them, because we're used to see them there. They're just tricks of the light