Perfection is only attainable within Perfection

So I haven't posted in a while, because I was worried about formulating my ideas more clearly, aswell as making sure I made sense. Well it is a good idea to make sense, but I think seeing the process unfold can be a beneficial thing aswell. There is something to be said of keeping the aesthetic beauty of something intact by leaving some of it's original form in place. I am speaking of my writing style in this instance.

I am in a summer school art class at the moment, and it is so liberating and exciting. This class has added a filter of perception to my brain, that as I go about my normal things, I am seeing the world through a whole new set of eyes. I still have all of my old biases, but this is now an added one that plays with all of the others. (see right now I realize that my subject is a little fuzzy, aswell as my meaning, will try to clear this up). It is like when you read a book, you could look at it from the historical perspective, a feministic perspective, why did the author write it, so many ways. So I call these the filters through which we see the world. ( see I am bringing it back, slowly I know). Each of these gives context to the book, and allow us to experience it on a deeper level.

Well this filter of perception that is true for books, is also true for our interaction with others. All of this is covered in philosophy, so I won't delve into it too deeply, but it has major relevance. As I meet new people, many of these filters come to my head, and I question which ones apply to the current situation, and which are irrelevant. This ability to decide on appropriateness of these ideas is a factor of intelligence, but so is the ability to have many filters. (aha, another subject to discuss in a later blog, the idea of multiple intelligences, and what I believe are some of the factors). So what happens when, upon meeting a new person, wondering what their background is, where did that accent come from, how much of what you say do they understand based off of your analysis of their education level? These are all good ideas, but with too many of them, they become overwhelming, especially when people accidentally give off false clues, maybe use a high register word that is not normally a part of their vocabulary ( and here I could go off on all the false clues I have seen, or just misconceptions I had based upon a first impression.)

I have said how these multiple filters can be a negative in light of meeting a new person and trying to fit them into your understanding. But the process of allowing your mind to wander through so many ideas, and come to random conclusions can also be a good thing. For one, once it is refined, can allow for very deep insights without a lot of information, case in point, Sherlock Holmes. All of his assumptions always seemed to turn out right, but as I work at Starbucks and see inordinate amounts of people walk through the door, there is much information that can be gained from appearances. What I have learned from experience is how much weight to give to these. Everyone has inconsistencies in their lives. My room might be a mess while my car is spotless. Granted, this extreme is rare, but people are always in the process of changing and growing, and they do not grow at the same rate in every area ( this has been a recent acknowledgement for me, and a great relief to the personal internal inconsistencies I saw in myself. I can now realize that these are a part of the human condition).

Let me summarize what we have up to now, so we can go further. So we have perceptions through which we see the world, these allow us to put context to our experiences and interactions with others, and allow us to instantly gather a great deal of information about the other person, but we have to further the relationship to see how much of this initial information truly describes the person. There are many good and bad things about this way we see other people, but that is what happens. So on to my point. With adhd, these filters come pouring into my brain, without the ability to decide which are more relevant than others. Or if I chose to try to decide which are more important, I become overwhelmed with competing ideas and the degree of relevance each has in comparison to the other. You could call this getting caught up in the process without regard to the results. I have learned how to continually think about, why was I trying to do this, what was the point of this thinking process. By continually analyzing this, I am able to have a wide variety of ideas and still narrow them down into a cohesive idea or result.

An interesting by product of these multiple filters of perception and random associations, is the ability of memory. Because any experience, like meeting someone with an accent, has this huge database of ideas and thought experience surrounding the event. So I do not only have the one experience of meeting this person with an accent, I have what I was thinking about, the free associations and Ideas that were swirling around in my brain, aswell as the strange Sherlock like conclusions that my brain came to. Now these ideas my not be relevant to the interaction, but they serve to preserve it in my brain. If someone mentions accents and asks if I ever met someone with a strange one, I can recall a large portion of my meeting because of the volumes of information I associated with that meeting. I might remember what they were wearing, what we talked about, or more likely the ideas that came to my head as a result of meeting them. So learning how to control this process, or at least use it to your advantage could be a very helpful thing.