It seems silly to mark the occasion of my 500th page in this journal with some look back on what my experiences have been since September. For you can go ahead and read about all of that if you want (again, maybe).
I've been reading, "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynmann" and realizing that this man has done and experienced so many things in his life, it seems so awesome to get a brief view into it all - and so overwhelming. Naturally, I think about my own experiences, and if having a greater breadth of experiences is automatically better than being sheltered, insular.
Well, to let you in on my thought process, I took two extreme cases. On the one hand is a worldly man like Richard Feynmann who traveled the world and approached life with reckless abandon. He had such a wide variety of experiences that his bar was raised quite high, in terms of what was an important experience. Not that he was pompous - an experience didn't need to be superficially important, but in order to achieve a unique experience, it was harder because his scope was so large.
Now, for a typical farming Mozambican, their scope is very limited, this limiting the variety of their experiences. But within their respective scopes, there are equally impactful experiences, completely relative to what they have previously experienced. A farmer may talk about a bumper crop in the same tone that an ambassador speaks of meeting a queen.
I picture their scopes of experience as circles. When you get closer to the edge, the experiences are further away from the norm (the center) and more impactful. When you have an experience that's outside the circle, it increases the scope of your experiences and similar experiences (which your circle now includes implicitly) aren't as impactful as that first experience.
Like me coming here. The first few days were mind-blowing, but I'm not amazed every day by the same things I was amazed by then. This idea of scope is just an explanation of how humans adapt, but is also helping me understand people whose lives are lesser in scope but not necessarily in urgency, importance, or depth. Many times it works the other way - those of us who have all sorts of things under their belt don't take advantage of opportunities and don't have many experiences along the edge of the circle.
Started filming bike maintenance and safety video today that might be Africa-wide, for Peace Corps. It's funny.
Peace
John
