One Hundred People, One Hundred Minds...

     I’m at a friends place near the beach in Copenhagen. As usual at a party a lap top is out and everyone is trying their hand at being a DJ. The group is really diverse so music choices are difficult...  To make matters worse there are a few music snobs in attendance. You know those types, their music - usually underground rock - is brilliant while everyone else’s more mainstream taste is rubbish. Eventually it got to the point that I didn’t even want to try to choose a song for fear of reprisal. The point I have here is just how different everyone really is. Music, like the taste of food, is totally subjective and is based on feelings they illicit for each individual person. A person’s taste in these areas can be expanded, but it’s nearly impossible to change. The best way to verbalise my ideas here is to steal the words of the wise DJ at the wedding I was at in Slovenia. When describing how hard it is to make everyone happy with wedding music he had the following to say. “One hundred people, One hundred minds”.

      The way a person sees reality is not learned, it’s inherent. I always loved the way Robert M Pirsig in his great book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mechanics” summed it all up.  “Everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. People who can't stand Aristotle's endless specificity of detail are natural lovers of Plato's soaring generalities. People who can't stand the eternal lofty idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts of Aristotle.” To help clarify this point, I want to bring up a great conversation I had with an old friend last week in Slovenia. Now first things first, the two of us see the world in totally different ways. He is a quintessential how to person; how do I do this, how do I build this, how does it work. He is hard wired in the moment - an Aristotelian. Me, on the other hand, can sit in a room and completely disappear into my mind. I’ll take the time, to think about things. In this way I am living in the past, present and future simultaneously... and making connections between the three at once. I’m theorizing, thinking, dreaming - a classical Platonist. My friend and I, both being open minded, actually see this massive difference as a strength to tap in each other. We both have agreed, we could use an injection of the others thinking style. Unfortunately, our maturity in this matter, does not always spill over to everyone.

     What I’m getting at here is that even if we’ll never be able to agree on tastes, or how the world is.... we still have to do our best to respect other points of view no matter how alien they might seem. Sitting in a room of people that think and act the same as you do is reassuring, but it hardly lets a person grow. Further, it’s the group pressure to act in ways one is not naturally that is one of the chief engines in many people’s unhappiness. If there was ever a reason, I took to all of these travels it was to see myself grow inside, to become more accepting, and become less sure of just how things are. Difference is what gives the world it’s colour, and really it is always what I'll be interested in.