The other day I was driving home from work and I spotted a house I’d never seen before. I must have driven past it a thousand times, and yet I’d never noticed it. That kind of rattled me. I mean, this is an entire HOUSE. How do you overlook a house? And if I’ve missed that, what else am I failing to see?
My mother passed away 23 years ago, and I still learn new things about her by talking to other people who knew her. My sister has even said to me that it was as if we had two different mothers. People are different things to different people.
I worked with one man for 6 years, and he dropped dead in the Kmart parking lot just two weeks after retiring. We all planned to go to the funeral, but his wife told us there wouldn’t be one, because they believed that the aliens would come and take him away to a new life. How do you work with someone for years and not know that interesting bit of information about him?
Someone told me recently that she decided to look up her first boyfriend from high school. She was curious how he was after all these years. She found out he was in prison for serial rape. Apparently he liked to pick up women in bars, take them home, tie them up with duct tape and then rape them. You’d have never predicted that type of future for this guy. But isn’t that always the way? You see it on the news all the time. “He always seemed like a nice guy. Sure, he kept to himself a lot, but…”
All this has me thinking about the nature of reality. I mean, even if you’re an identical twin and have the same job, you’ll each see different things on the drive home. You’ll know different things about friends and loved ones, have different life experiences, and acquire different knowledge. Your realities will be completely distinct. So reality isn’t as concrete as we’d all like to believe. It’s like standing on solid ground and having it suddenly shift beneath your feet. That’s kind of scary.
The View from a Drawbridge 
Okay, I wasn’t expecting that.
Dare I ask what you WERE expecting?
Now that I think about it, I have no idea. The way my brain works, I expect anything.