In the light

The previous post leads me to further musings from who is Lance really? to who are you really and then to who am I, really?  For many of us we are who we think we see reflected in the faces of others.  Not many of us have a self image made entirely alone.  But how accurate is the image we see or how accurately do we read what we see or think what we are seeing.  Take this to as many iterations that you can keep track of and the task doesn't get any easier.  

I have had a different sense of myself at different stages of my life (as you would expect) but the latest iteration can also marvel at the naivety of the previous in not being able to see what was now obvious. Some might put this down to the aging process, after all the consciousness of a three month old child is going to be different to that child as a sixteen, thirty six and sixty six year old.  Growth is not a linear progression but rather takes the shapes of spurts and plateaus and sometimes mimics sleep.  Hind sight can inform or reinvent or just explain in your own terms and through your own filter set.

The famous experiment with six policemen ("expert observers"?) seeing the same sequence of events and then asked to recall what they saw moments later produced six different descriptions none of which accurately described what happened.  Good luck in court.

Reality then is, as Einstein said, is relative.  It's knowing relative to what and when that the trick lies.
The older I get the more I realise how little I know.  There are probably good Darwinian reasons for this, some of them fairly obvious.  It is not a great starting point  to doing anything to be consumed with doubt.