touché

all i have to say is that i am very proud of my wife's defense of her beliefs.

new shoes

on monday i decided to go mountain biking again, which helped impress upon me an important point- and no i don't mean how out of shape i am. i went riding with a friend of mine that i have known and ridden with for about 12 years. as we rode up one hill it suddenly occurred to me why it was difficult to ride up hills. this may not seem as a great revelation to most people, but it was to me. for me it was an epiphany because i had never really had a problem riding hills, i actually used to like them, but now that i am out of shape and don't ride, i could finally understand why people would be out of breath and tired by the time that they reached the top of the hill- it really was tough. back when i used to race i was used to climbing hill after hill after hill and my body was conditioned to this stimulus, but now it was no longer responsive in the same way. of course in this context it is no great surprise to anybody of reasonable intelligence, but when the same concept is applied to other situations, it often becomes invisible. i know that many times i will see somebody do something or react a certain way and i just think why are they doing that? it is the same thing, i can not understand because i am not in their situation. i think that most people have this problem, though some worse than others. i believe that this egocentric perspective is just human nature, but i think that it is something that we can all change about ourselves. i believe that if we each put ourselves in someone else's shoes and looked at the world the same way that they view it at that exact point in time, the world would be a much better place. i know that this sounds very utopian, but i believe that just a little bit of understanding will go twice as far as twice as much ignorance.