Cultural Anthropology

Examine your life and the life of those around you from the perspective of a researcher. Treat interactions as neither good nor bad, but rather as opportunities to observe, to learn, to internalize.

Question your relationship with those around you. Why are they the way they are? How do you approach conversations with each person? How does it differ? How do you feel they approach conversations with you? If you reflect do you notice any bias in you considerations for the questions above?

Why are you unique? What made you the way are today? What is fresh about your perspective of the world? Think of all of the myriad of factors that have led to your reality of today, those factors in your control and those factors out of your control. The hundreds of people you’ve interacted with throughout your life. A chain of interconnectedness.

Now think about each of your parents as unique individuals who have each had their own journey through life, hopes, fears, loves, losses, and a spiderweb of interactions leading them to one day meet each other in whatever they did and create you. That’s pretty wonderful.

If you’ve got the imagination for it, you can continue this exercise apply it to your grandparents, their grandparents, and their grandparents. The web grows larger and larger yet the strands get closer and closer, knit tighter and tighter. The insane improbable utterly ridiculous amount of coincidences and connections that had to be made to put you on this planet and experiencing this fantastic reality we exist in is pretty great.

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Don’t forget. All is maybe. But this might be a funner existence.