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[joetwosixfour]

A week ago this evening I stood on Main Street in Ann Arbor and tried a door handle, finding it to be locked. With that act, I concluded a year of graduate school and, having just quit all three of my jobs earlier that day, was finally free of the oppressive business (as in 'busy-ness') that had fallen on me several months earlier and prevented me

Comments

[paintedglass]

I think it's really true about people living in unique and independently private universes/perspectives... but I also think that with the right combination of requisite similarities and receptivity, those separate universes can begin to converge and have an influence on each other. I think you can begin to experience things the way someone else does after spending enough consistent time with/around them. To what degree this is possible or likely to occur depends on that aforementioned combination. So I think the thing to look for in people, instead of simply how much of an overlap already exists in the Venn diagram of the circles each of you represent, is a potential for positive reciprocal influence between yourself and another.

I haven't really figured out exactly how to make this kind of determination about someone, but I think it's at least as important of a determination to make as that of their already existing similarity to you. When I realized this, it kind of opened the world up a little more and was comforting.

Receptivity and transform...ability (transformability? that can't be a word) aren't as common of traits in people as I'd like them to be, but I guess my point is that people exert and exchange influence on each other, and sometimes you can find that a person who experienced totally different parts of reality than yourself will begin to absorb/adopt/internalize/learn to notice the stuff you do just by being friends and spending time together.

-em