Sitting in the bay window I can see huge ships, hillsides and an expanse of water that - if I stand up and look over to the southeast and past the small strip of land that connects Pendennis with the rest of Falmouth - seems to go on forever.
From this viewpoint, you can see people strolling arm in arm down the pier, the homeless person who has taken up residence outside an old shop, and people meandering up and down the main street, some with a purpose others not.
I can see this as I sit here in the old, worn leather arm chair with my back to another bay window.
Logic tells me that if I look out of any other window in the house, I will also see people milling about or going about their day to day chores. Perhaps I could see someone enjoying an afternoon drink in a pub, or a pasty on one of the benches on the moor. Expand my imagination and I might be able to imagine people walking their dogs up by the castle, or eating ice cream on the beach. The thing is, when I stop trying to imagine them, then those people retreat to the shadows of my imagination.
As humans, we are limited to the senses that we experience and, although we do have the power of imagination, we can not sustain or truly grasp the immensity of what is life.
In the square mile around me there might be a few hundred, a thousand (maybe) people going about their own lives. There are seagulls, cats, dogs, pigeons to whatever numbers... And then we have potentially millions of insects, and then billions of bacteria. Unimaginable.
Humans think small.
Our brain receives the information but it only processes some of it.
This focus on the small stuff makes it easier to pass a £25,000 item through a business budget than getting just £500 for a laptop. (I used to work in IT. It was easier to get a full server system than it was to replace a broken P.C.).
The mind is biased towards the small details and petty items that it can properly grasp onto.
It is said that problems always seem so big until you imagine looking down on yourself from up in space - that it can give you the perspective that things aren't as big as you think.
The only real question is: if we are predestined to think small, perhaps the only real choice that we have is how small minded we decide to let ourselves be.
