Perspective

Today is a beau­ti­ful day here in San Fran­cis­co. Sun­ny, prob­a­bly over 70. I wish I’d left my coat at home, but of course you can nev­er tell about some­thing like that. Bet­ter safe than sor­ry, no? I real­ly wish I’d brought my shorts and shoes – It’s a per­fect day to run. I could use a run, too. I’m blimp­ing out over here.

Walk­ing to the MUNI sta­tion at Embar­cadero I noticed some­thing quite odd. It’s a phe­nom­e­non I’ve noticed before that accom­pa­nies the lift­ing of depres­sion. I become aware of my height, of the dis­tance between my point of view and the ground.

I see things going past below my sight­line, and notice that I’m above them or taller than them. Usu­al­ly my per­ceived height is very very low down. It’s strange to think that depressed self-image would make me per­ceive myself as being phys­i­cal­ly small­er, but there it is. I nor­mal­ly assume that most peo­ple are taller than I am, and have been occa­sion­al­ly sur­prised to dis­cov­er that some­one I’ve known for years stands six or eight inch­es small­er than I do.

There’s some­thing more to it than just the com­par­a­tive change. When I see myself at my full height (I’m not pas­r­tic­u­lar­ly tall, either – approach­ing 5′9″ makes me decid­ed­ly aver­age) I don’t just see myself next to or near oth­ers, in a basi­cal­ly flat plane, I actu­al­ly have the expe­ri­ence of see­ing the depth of the mun­dane world. With­out this shift in per­cep­tion, I run around in a flat maze, like a board game. With it, my envi­ron­ment is processed through my cog­ni­tive cen­ters as being ful­ly three-dimensional.

Some­times I won­der that the entire uni­verse is lost on me through a fail­ure of trans­la­tion and inter­pre­ta­tion. I mean, imag­ine my sur­prise at dis­cov­er­ing that the world is not flat!