This past weekend, watching our son play football, the Lady Talis and I got to talking about Marching Band. She suggested that parents may attend college games simply to see their kids perform in band. Cheerleader parents too. This concept never occurred to me. As strange as it seems it felt like the high school years were the only time that these other aspects of the game required parental support. Yet they aren’t. For the parents (and kids) what they are out there doing is every bit as important and worthy of parental love as those 22 kids on the field at a time playing football (or any sport). Not getting that is indicative of a mindset that prioritizes the athlete and the FB athlete in particular. This is likely thanks to my own kids being so sunk into the sport. I only think about why I’m there, which is very selfish.
I bring this up now as a way of understanding my own myopia; how I tend to see the world solely through my own lens. It is a very small lens and in some ways that makes me a very small person who is only now, 50 yrs in, starting to recognize that. It isn’t that I don’t care about other people and perspectives, it is just that I am so focused on. my own and caught up in the drama of it and of all the inputs related to it that I fail to see much significance in what anyone else is doing in that shared space we call a universe. This understanding calls out to me, helping me realize and recognize that this is exactly how isolated and self-facing we’ve become as a society. Each of us exists in our own filter bubble and we constantly reinforce the barriers of that space by refusing to acknowledge anything outside of it. Some bubbles are bigger than others, but they are bubbles nonetheless.