Between Here and There

You’d be forgiven if you’ve wondered how long a person can draw out a narrative regarding Barcelona after spending only two and a half days there. Trust me, dear reader, I’m keenly aware that this is a slow drip of information and nuance designed to capture those prescient moments between the senses. I have a gallery of updated pictures, and I will provide the link at the bottom of this story should you want to peruse it as time permits.

I’ve spent most of the day today running errands and shaking off the cobwebs of yet another moment of time zone offset. There’s nothing like beating the sun to the rising, and yet, less than 12 hours later, I’m in the throes of a heap of work, distracted, happy, and plotting my next adventure.

Today, I want to draw your attention to how our world is shaped and formed. The edges and curves, the rust and shiny new metals, the glass and sand, the dull and the worn smooth speak of our world in different ways. When you look up through a distorted lens of glass and metal, you see the lines differently, rigid and inflexible for their sole task of defining space. When you step foot on a sandy beach, the contours of the grains shape themselves to your foot, defining an experience that is deceitful for all the effort expended. Our world is crafted of these experiences, one by one, and within their grasp, we find ourselves existing.

I’ve had occasion to view today’s picture through a lens of a different sort: a virtual reality headset that creates a seamless story across two smaller screens positioned in front of each eye. To say that you can catch the nuances of position and place much better would be to undersell it a bit. This is still a perception of a three-dimensional world in a two-dimensional space, after all. No, the difference comes in the nuance of picking out the shapes and colours, the contrasts and shadows of these materials that form our world. It heightens the experience just a bit more than what you’d typically see from your phone, monitor, TV, or laptop, and in a way, it drives your senses with a different level of acuity.

This isn’t an ad for the headset. If anything, it highlights the perilous cliffs we walk between what is real and what isn’t. I’m not convinced that what we’ve developed will take over the world or our pursuit of human interaction. If anything, we’ve created parodies of the technological elite, strolling about in their headsets like the world doesn’t exist, taking advantage of the novelty of new moments to drive a wedge in the classicism between those who have and have not. It’s a damning indictment of hubris to believe that what you’ve created somehow surpasses the creation around you.

There are merits to it. Emma and I will critically examine this technology for potential as an assistive device. Others have paved the way in using Augmented, Extended, Mixed, and Virtual Reality devices to impact spectrum disorders, treatment modalities, and other such regimens. A role can be played within our creative arts: the close examination of humanity’s interactions with each other in more intimate, close-knit settings. There’s a real sense that such devices can bring a person closer to the people they’re furthest from, and even the understanding that how we entertain ourselves is changing. There’s a lot of upside, even when there are pitfalls in the paths ahead.

I’m reminded that we exist for a reason. We are created, flesh, bone, and blood for a purpose. Biological imperatives and survival of the fittest of our species aside, we exist to play, embrace, love, and lose. We exist to categorically decimate the roles ascribed to us by Nature’s hierarchy, pantomime our obescience, and fall at the footsteps of her throne when we realise we are but fallible creatures. We are given to wonder and marvel: the night sky with its brilliant jewel-like stars, the edges of rooftops juxtaposed with the serenity of blue sky and puffy white clouds, the celestial stream of the Milky Way, and so on. When we close our eyes at night, we’re given over to the complex interactions of neural activity, the dance of potassium ion channels, and sparks of current running through our synapses. It’s a beautiful dance we have in being able to dip between reality and that which tries its best to resemble it.

My day is coming to a close here, and a good friend and mentor from PEI is in Boston with his family, so I’m heading out for a few drinks and some laughs, enjoying the reality of connection and being in the moment with him and his partner. It’s not something I feel could be done in quite the same way with a headset, but maybe that time is coming. We shall see.

Until we meet again in this digital public square, I bid you adieu, and may the stars shine their light in the darkness surrounding you so that you can always find home.

May it ever (and always) be so.