​I don’t know all the things I don’t know. I try to know those things, but there are so many of them to know that I know I will not be able to fully know. At least not all of them. I don’t know. But on top of that, I also don’t know all the ways I am—as an organism of biological, psychological, and sociological dimension—that prevent me from knowing certain things. This post, therefore, is about the limits of perspective. What are they? Who knows. Let's see.
 
First, a quote. This is from an anonymous reddit user whose beautiful words have made their way around the internet. He or she actually employed this quote as a defense of the purpose of literature, but the first two paragraphs greatly serve our purposes here. The whole thing is good, but what’s most important to us is the way this person describes the limits of such a small, singular perspective. Here we go.
 
“The universe is huge. Time is impossibly vast. Trillions of creatures crawl and swim and fly through our planet. Billions of people live, billions came before us, and billions will come after. We cannot count, cannot even properly imagine, the number of perspectives and variety of experiences offered by existence.
 
We sip all of this richness through the very narrowest of straws: one lifetime, one consciousness, one perspective, one set of experiences. Of all the universe has, has had, and will have to offer, we can know only the tiniest fraction. We are alone and minuscule and our lives are over in a blink.”
 
What I want to look at is that narrow straw. See the straw. Be the straw. Oh wait, you are already? Great.
 
If we take the pantheon of applicable experience, say like, every living creature that has lived on the planet and experienced something since the planet formed, you can say they each had a perspective, right? Cool. Now, for pragmatic purposes, let’s shrink that sample size to every person ever. Every human that has ever lived. Each one has had his or her own individual perspective on reality, on the universe, on the purpose or meaning of life, etc. etc. etc. Some are similar, sure, but every one is unique. We could also say they each have their own story, but let’s save that for another post. (Read: the rest of the quote above.) So here, so I don't go into some superfluous diatribe, let’s focus on the idea of each person having a unique perspective.
 
Well, what are the things that make up that unique perspective? There are plenty of lists out there that explore this question, but many of those lists frame the conversation in terms of identity. This is important: your identity, in a way, creates your perspective. For example, an ultra-simplified description of my perspective might read something like this: white male, mid-thirties, writer, educator, gamer, rocker. Sounds like a police description of me crossed with a bad dating profile.
 
The next step, then, is to understand that those identity traits actually compose my perspective, my narrow straw my individual, unique way of experiencing the natural phenomena of the universe. That phenomena might be biological, natural, interpersonal, or sociological, but whatever it is, you experience it uniquely, through your own unique straw, from your own unique location in space and time. Pure, immutable uniqueness. That’s pretty cool, right?

Again, this is different from agreeing about a movie or political point or paint color. No two people can truly see the exact same shade of red. Of course we say or think we do for practical purposes, but if you want to be totally honest, AND you want to then think of all the other uncountable phenomena AND ways to experience it, well, you're back to induplicable uniqueness again.
 
So let’s talk about what some of the aspects of perspective are. We already said our standard identity markers, like age, gender, and race. Worth noting here that many phenomena that people experience by virtue of interactions at school or work, events in the news, or social structures are experienced differently by a ten-year old or a thirty-year-old or a sixty-year-old, by a man or a woman or a transgender individual, or by a black person or brown person or white person or native person or eastern Asian person or central Asian person or Middle Eastern person or or or or...whew. Even our words for this identity stuff can get complicated.
 
I'm well aware that there are libraries worth of political considerations and anthropological implications and stand-up comedy jokes in that last paragraph, but I’m going to steer clear of those here. I want to stay focused on perspective. Is your straw still pointing at perspective? Good.
 
Some other aspects of our perspective are not often considered. Our biology: the shape and movement and ability of our bodies, the induplicable fingerprints that are our sensory organs, the number of neurons we have firing at any given moment. Our history: our individual history, but also our placement on the timeline of human history, or the history of our nation, region, city, or family. Our political leanings shape our perspective, our religion, our education, our income, our class, our culture, our politics, our conditioning, our expectations for how people should act and how well we believe we should hold ourselves to those standards or even how well we actually can. All of these do not just affect, but actually create, the ways we see the world because they are the shape of the straw, and they are the filters and lenses we put on the straw.

Then there are even tricks and pitfalls to managing your straw. Observation bias means that something changes when you are observing it. Does the teacher think that the students are all that well behaved when he leaves the room? Nope. Or how about confirmation bias, where you see what you want to see. The fridge might be full of vegetables, but it looks empty to me. Or how about language bias, where your language shapes what you can and can't understand, or as Wittgenstein famously put it, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." Some native peoples have far more words for "snow" than you find in English. I'd wager, with more linguistic tools for it in their toolbox, they understand the stuff better. And don't even think this is an exhaustive list of biases. Don't let your bias think I'm telling you everything.

Author, skeptic, and proud miscreant Robert Anton Wilson refers to the unique perspective straw as one’s “reality tunnel.” And once you learn or understand that you have a reality tunnel, it’s a difficult idea to unlearn.

But while identity categories create our perspective (aka our “reality tunnel” aka the straw), the yang to this yin is that those categories also limit that perspective. As a white male, I can’t experience Chicago as a black woman. Just not possible. No one can or should assume their perspective is the end-all-be-all of what reality is; it's just what reality is to them. If I want to know what someone else's experience is, I shouldn't assume, I should listen with open ears. A sixty-year-old can try to imagine life as a ten-year-old, but it’s much harder the other way around. No human perspective is omnipotent, and therefore there must inherently be limits to the understanding and knowledge of any perspective. I can’t know everything. I can’t always know what I don’t know or why I don’t know it, and you know what? I shouldn’t always be invited to the party either. The ocean is for the fish; the sky for the birds. Humans have our own range of experience. Our antennae only gets certain channels, and even then, each of us won’t ever get every human channel.

The cool thing is you can add channels here or there, or at least clarify the reception on some of them. How’s that? You know plenty of ways already. Reading, especially literature, or about people vastly different from you. Other media works. Travel. Talk to people. Imagine what other people’s lives are like. Even (maybe especially) if it’s uncomfortable. Explore a new culture or group. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Assume they’re good. Ask them what they think. Practice empathy. Just be open.

And appreciate your straw. It’s awesome, isn’t it? It's your life. It's you're identity. You’re awesome. No? Of course you are. Don't tell me you have a kink you need to work out of your tunnel. Every  moment can alter your tunnel in some way, so protect it. It’s yours to take care of. You’re the only one who has it. Stretch it out. Work it out. Test out new lenses, but remember to give them a good polish from time to time. I imagine you want to see as clearly as possible. It's breathtaking when the light catches it just right.

The other day I received a text message from my sister. “What was that quote you told me the other day?” She asked. “It was about being a good person and not caring what other people thing.” While I was reading this text message, and I’m not making this up, my wife asked me, “What was that quote you said the other day? It was really good.”
 
Apparently. But I still can’t remember what quote it was. A tragedy. Maybe we’ll get back to this later.
 
But it is like me to spout quotes. I’m a quote spouter. They make you look smart. People like them. It always puts that kind of “Huh” look on their faces, which they seem to appreciate. But collecting and reciting quotes is more than cocktail party tricks. Quotes help us by crystallizing a piece of knowledge or wisdom for us. They tell us something maybe we already knew but had forgotten or couldn’t really articulate, or they offer us a new way of looking at something, whether ourselves or other people or our world. Often they’re witty, and though they don’t have to be, it helps. Most importantly, though, a quote is incisive: you feel that little catch of breath when your read it. Almost as though your soul senses its truth before you even process the quote.
 
I have a 28-page document on my computer with quotes from over the years, along with plenty tacked up here and there around the apartment for inspiration, enjoyment, or just to keep our butts in check. Among these quotes you can find people who have become eminently quotable, people whose words are heavier on the page when put between quotation marks. Everyone has their own list, but for me, I think of Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, and Bruce Lee, though this is certainly not an exhaustive list. (Yogi Berra should be mentioned for different reasons.) The quotes of each of these three individuals, among others, are mentionable because they fit the criteria that we, the general populous, wants in a good quote: 1) small pieces of wisdom that 2) are able to be committed to memory (for pragmatic employment in life’s myriad situations) and that 3) are also examples of aesthetically pleasing prose. Some quick examples:
 
“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
--Mark Twain
 
“If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.”
--Maya Angelou
 
“Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.”
--Bruce Lee
 
These quotes (and it took me less than two minutes to find them) are compact and powerful to the point that explanation is not necessary. That is what a quote is supposed to do.
 
Now, for a brief detour, let’s compare that with a few quotes I found on the internet that do not, as far as I’m concerned, fit our three criteria above nearly as well.
 
“When you invest your time, you make a goal and a decision of something that you want to accomplish. Whether it's make good grades in school, be a good athlete, be a good person, go down and do some community service and help somebody who's in need, whatever it is you choose to do, you're investing your time in that.”
--Nick Saban
 
“If everyone were a good person, it'd obviously be a better world.”
—Aaron Paul
 
Now nothing against these two gentlemen, who are extremely talented and good at what they do. But hopefully you can see what I mean. I wish these were pithier, more compact, more incisive. In short, I want more magic. You know it when you see it. You read a quote and instantly think, “Dang,” because its truth is that powerful. Its breadth is that wide.
 
And that’s really what good quotes are about: truth. And the wisdom needed to express that truth. Quotes keep those words alive, forever crystallizing them as living words of a timeless truth, living words once spoken or written by people that at this moment may or may not be living. Quotation marks themselves are a symbol of that vitality. There are two on each side—partners, never alone—reverently framing those words like a painting. They have a dynamic shape, with a wide end tapering to a narrow end, and they have a dynamic form: a curve, a turn, a change in course, a moving toward something new.
 
Because human wisdom is a living thing. It is not just timeless; it stretches through the ages, touching all people and societies, all category of human and culture. And whether that quote, that nugget of wisdom, is embedded in an article or magneted to a refrigerator, those living words are brought back to life in the instant a person reads the quote, speaks the quote, honors the quote by understanding how it’s wisdom can be applied to his or her life, immortalizes the quote by allowing it to change them.
 
And so, I thought I would end this post by honoring a few quotes that have changed me. A few notes. First, I regret that most of the people quoted here are white men, but I cannot argue with the wisdom in these words. In a way, it is the quote that matters far more than its creator. That said, I realize it is incumbent upon me to seek out diverse emanations of wisdom. Truth demands it. Second, a couple of these quotes have been deemed apocryphal or misattributed, and the explorations of that phenomenon could be a blog post (or dissertation) all its own. For the time being, though, I want to focus on the words within the quote. If one truly speaks to you, I encourage you to research. Once again, truth. 
 
“Don’t write so that you can be understood; write so that you can’t be misunderstood.”
--William Howard Taft
 
“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
 
"The map is not the territory."
—Alfred Korzybski
 
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
--Eleanor Roosevelt
 
"Long live the child. Long live the mother and father. Long live man. Long live this wounded planet. Long live the good milk of the air. Long live the spawning rivers and the mothering oceans. Long live the juice of the grass and all the determined greenery of the globe. Long live the surviving animals. Long live the Earth, deeper than all our thinking. We have done enough killing. Long live the man, long live the woman who use both courage and compassion. Long live their children."
--From the film "The Body"

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
--Maya Angelou (possibly apocryphal)

"Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence."
--Erich Fromm
 
"Let your own presence be something that convinces the world."
--Ken Wilber

And no, I never did remember that quote from up above. And I’m okay with that. “Thoughts are circular,” a friend of mine says. “It will come back to you.” But it’s fine if it doesn’t. The well is bottomless.