Returning to a theme I touched on a few entries ago -

Listening to "This is Water", David Foster Wallace's excellent commencement address from, I think, 2005, I heard several things that connected to other voices I have heard in the near and distant past.

Chief among these is the notion that our perception of and interaction with the world around us is informed in no small part by our awareness, our filtering system. In addition to the filters through which everything (including what you are reading right now) passes, we have our own internal system of separating what is going on around us into what is important and what is unimportant, what has value and what doesn't.

I know people who, no matter what situation they find themselves in, can find and articulate the negative aspects of it. These people, if I accept their interpretation, can suck the life right out of a room.

I used to try to pit my interpretation of what was going on against theirs, until I realized the futility, not to mention arrogance, at play there. Doing that is just one more way of accepting their view, of assigning importance to it.

It reminds me of an instruction I received about meditation. Trying not to think is futile, at least for some of us. You could argue that its not the kind of thing that yields to effort. Much more effective to let thoughts appear, since I can't stop them anyway, and then let them go. It appears that the letting go part is key.