The first time I saw this, my brain went completely blank.

another view of our map -- just as "correct" as the more familiar view

The first time I heard how British textbooks teach children the story of the American War for Independence, my brain went blank. In both instances, I was a grown-ass woman, in my late 30s, and yet I was kind of floored. Oh, the things I’d never even questioned, the things I just accepted unquestioningly as the obvious truth. I may have been kind of slow, but I think we all do this. After all, there’s not enough time to think closely about every tiny thought we have, and most of the time it’s just not necessary.

But I’ve always been fascinated by the possibility that my understanding is profoundly limited. In my younger years, every fall I read all the Carlos Castaneda books. I was most fascinated by the Yaqui ability to see, that involved seeing humans as luminous bobbing egg shapes of energy. Those who had given birth had dark spots in the lower part, because they’d lost some of the energy in giving it to the creation of a new being. I was curious about seeing the “lines of the world,” the energy that existed in a kind of grid and could be used by people if they knew how, and could see them in the first place. Setting aside those details, I do know there’s so much going on all around me that I am unable to see because of limitations of my human apparatus. I can’t see parts of the light spectrum, I’m limited.

Of course there are other limitations we can circumvent if we try very hard. We get stuck in our heads, locked into our definitions and descriptions, and we’re busy! For heaven’s sake, there are kids to be driven around, plans to make, laundry to do, work to get done…always too much work to get done, husbands to tend to, groceries to buy and prepare, old folks to care for and babies to feed, who has the time?

But can you stop for 5 minutes? Just 5? Set a timer so you don’t have to worry that you’ll screw up and do this for 6 whole minutes — the horror, what would you do then — but just do this. Just do this for 5 minutes. Sit still and look. See what all you can see. I had my 10am break this morning and decided to keep my eyes open and try to actually look, while paying attention to my mind which kept wanting to drag me to a to-do list, or to this afternoon, or next week, or when I was 5. I’d notice it was doing that again and let it drift away, and think “be here now. Just be here now.” Here’s what I saw.

Birds — pigeons walking around the street, sparrows flitting around in the branches. It’s a bird’s world, my street, what is their world? Lots of ledges, lots of small branches, little hollows under eaves for nesting, small patches of ground around the trees, tiny puddles left over from the super’s sidewalk-washing this morning. It’s their world, they are busy having a bird-centered life and I’m just in it, watching out my window.

People — men walking their dogs, men parking cars, women hurrying somewhere, workmen carrying boards, supers talking to each other. Each one of those people is the center of a whole world, they have friends and families and colleagues and enemies and structures of relationships and work and hopes and worries. Some may be having a great day, some may be in despair. They’re the center of a world, and they participate in the worlds of so many others, and perhaps as they pass each other on the street there’s some kind of connection in that large structure with the person they pass, and they don’t know it. Each of those people is moving around in his or her own world, and I’m not even noticed as I watch out my window.

Dogs — On their leashes, sniffing the trees, marking the corners of buildings, stopping to sniff each other while their people wait, the familiar paths they probably take a couple of times a day. Their attention sharpens when another dog is near, which happens all the time. Theirs is a dog’s world, filled with the scent markings they and others have left, as they are taken out to do their business on sidewalks and their people pick it up for them. Their experience of the breeze may be as a source of a whole world of information.

Buildings — built by workmen, designed by architects and engineers, financed by bankers, plumbed and wired by working men (the buildings are 100 years old, so they were definitely men). The buildings have stood here for a century as life went on inside, and outside. Storms raged, night fell, garbage strikes lay at their feet, snow fell, for a hundred years. People moved in and out, some died inside undoubtedly, some were born inside probably, some fought, some were hurt, lots of people felt love inside that building.

Wind — the branches of the trees are dancing in the wind, and there’s an entire wind-world going on. It sweeps down my street as if its funneled; it swoops down the Hudson River at the end of my street. It swirls around the faces of people walking past, the animal life is probably keenly aware of it in a way I’m not. The birds may even understand it as a road system or in some way that’s inconceivable to me. The wind does what it does whether I’m watching or not.

I hear the sound of construction in the next block, the jackhammer buzzing and vibrating the floor. I hear the hiss and cracks of the radiator in my building, spitting dry heat into my living room. I hear the music I’m playing in the background while I work. I hear the buzzer to my apartment every 45 minutes this morning. I hear people come and go, the door opening and closing. I hear snippets of conversation through the glass of my closed window as people pass by on the sidewalk, just the sound really, not the words.

And at the end of my 5 minutes of looking, I was struck by the whole of it somehow, everything that’s going on all at once, and I thought of the wonderful last line of Raymond Carver’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love:”

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.