Can you see how this is funny?

Last month, I was talking to my boyfriend for advice about some issue that was going down between a friend and I. I was struggling to get the words out, and when I did, he burst out laughing.



"Can you see how this is kind of funny? From my perspective, as an outsider."



Understandably, my first reaction was defense and my second was annoyance. But then I did start to see. I was sitting at the edge of Dolores Park, overlooking the best city in the world, surrounded by dreadlocked pot smokers and dogs [1] [2], calling one of my favourite people in the world. I've been to SF enough times to realize that the city never changes, but the way I see the city does.





And with a month's worth of time and distance, I can see how that problem is really funny.



*****



That got me thinking about the games we play with ourselves in our heads, these wars and dramas and everything in between that we construct for ourselves. I probably had a billion ways of looking at that problem with my friend; the one I went with was just the most familiar.



One of my favourite lines from This Is Water — David Foster Wallace's meaning-of-life speech — is this:

The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.



Or get this. Someone introduced me to Dandapani the other day, and this retired monk-turned-entrepreneur's whole deal is, "You are the only person you have to spend the rest of your life with. So what are you going to do about it?"



"So you might as well look that person in the eye every day and say I love you, I trust you, you are capable," was the answer I scrawled in my journal this morning.



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[1] relevant

[2] "Figure out a way to travel to San Francisco and to meet other people who've moved there to pursue their dreams. Why San Francisco? San Francisco is the Schelling point for high-openness, smart, energetic, optimistic people. Global Weird HQ." from here