Our view of the world is not given to us from the outside in a pure, objective form; it is shaped by our mental abilities, our shared cultural perspectives and our unique values and beliefs. This is not to say that there is no reality outside our minds or that the world is just an illusion. It is to say that our version of reality is precisely that: our version, not the version. There is no single, universal or authoritative version that makes sense, other than as a theoretical construct. We can see the world only as it appears to us, not "as it truly is," because there is no "as it truly is" without a perspective to give it form. Philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that there is no "view from nowhere," since we cannot see the world except from a particular perspective, and that perspective influences what we see. We can experience the world only through the human lenses that make it intelligible to us.

When you look at the photos of an expert like Malick Sidibé, you are looking at a small fraction of the portraits he chose to show his viewers. Photos with closed eyes, crooked clothing, unflattering expressions, or those with a poor exposure, were surely edited out and hidden from his audience. Street photographers like Joel Meyerowitz make thousands of photos that are never seen by fans. His discriminating eye chooses exactly what he wants his audience to see. Any digital image that doesn't meet Meyerowitz's personal expectations is put in a folder that may never be opened again. Most of the photographs anyone makes will likely end up in a digital junk heap on a forgotten hard drive. The point is that photographers put a lot of creative energy, time, and expense into making photographs, most of which don't represent the quality the creator expects. Yet, those hidden photos are critically important to the process of image-making. They represent the stages of failure and experimentation needed to arrive at a creative breakthrough. Those in-between photos are part of the step-by-step development process that leads you from one successful image to the next.

Although instances occur in which partners start their relationship by telling everything about themselves to each other, such instances are rare. In most cases, the amount of disclosure increases over time. We begin relationships by revealing relatively little about ourselves; then if our first bits of self-disclosure are well received and bring on similar responses from the other person, we're willing to reveal more. This principle is important to remember. It would usually be a mistake to assume that the way to build a strong relationship would be to reveal the most private details about yourself when first making contact with another person. Unless the circumstances are unique, such baring of your soul would be likely to scare potential partners away rather than bring them closer.

Free play is nature's means of teaching children that they are not helpless. In play, away from adults, children really do have control and can practice asserting it. In free play, children learn to make their own decisions, solve their own problems, create and follow rules, and get along with others as equals rather than as obedient or rebellious subordinates. In active outdoor play, children deliberately dose themselves with moderate amounts of fear and they thereby learn how to control not only their bodies, but also their fear. In social play children learn how to negotiate with others, how to please others, and how to manage and overcome the anger that can arise from conflicts. None of these lessons can be taught through verbal means; they can be learned only through experience, which free play provides.

Early in the term, our art professor projected an image of a monk, his back to the viewer, standing on the shore, looking off into a blue sea and an enormous sky. The professor asked the class, "What do you see?" The darkened auditorium was silent. We looked and looked and thought and thought as hard as possible to unearth the hidden meaning, but came up with nothing ― we must have missed it. With dramatic exasperation she answered her own question, "It's a painting of a monk! His back is to us! He is standing near the shore! There's a blue sea and enormous sky!" Hmm... why didn't we see it? So as not to bias us, she'd posed the question without revealing the artist or title of the work. In fact, it was Caspar David Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea. To better understand your world, consciously acknowledge what you actually see rather than guess at what you think you are supposed to see.

Appreciating the collective nature of knowledge can correct our false notions of how we see the world. People love heroes. Individuals are given credit for major breakthroughs. Marie Curie is treated as if she worked alone to discover radioactivity and Newton as if he discovered the laws of motion by himself. The truth is that in the real world, nobody operates alone. Scientists not only have labs with students who contribute critical ideas, but also have colleagues who are doing similar work, thinking similar thoughts, and without whom the scientist would get nowhere. And then there are other scientists who are working on different problems, sometimes in different fields, but nevertheless set the stage through their own findings and ideas. Once we start understanding that knowledge isn't all in the head, that it's shared within a community, our heroes change. Instead of focusing on the individual, we begin to focus on a larger group.

It's hard to pay more for the speedy but highly skilled person, simply because there's less effort being observed. Two researchers once did a study in which they asked people how much they would pay for data recovery. They found that people would pay a little more for a greater quantity of rescued data, but what they were most sensitive to was the number of hours the technician worked. When the data recovery took only a few minutes, willingness to pay was low, but when it took more than a week to recover the same amount of data, people were willing to pay much more. Think about it: They were willing to pay more for the slower service with the same outcome. Fundamentally, when we value effort over outcome, we're paying for incompetence. Although it is actually irrational, we feel more rational, and more comfortable, paying for incompetence.

Consider the story of two men quarreling in a library. One wants the window open and the other wants it closed. They argue back and forth about how much to leave it open: a crack, halfway, or three-quarters of the way. No solution satisfies them both. Enter the librarian. She asks one why he wants the window open: "To get some fresh air." She asks the other why he wants it closed: "To avoid a draft." After thinking a minute, she opens wide a window in the next room, bringing in fresh air without a draft. This story is typical of many negotiations. Since the parties' problem appears to be a conflict of positions, they naturally tend to talk about positions ― and often reach an impasse. The librarian could not have invented the solution she did if she had focused only on the two men's stated positions of wanting the window open or closed. Instead, she looked to their underlying interests of fresh air and no draft.

Regardless of whether the people existing after agriculture were happier, healthier, or neither, it is undeniable that there were more of them. Agriculture both supports and requires more people to grow the crops that sustain them. Estimates vary, of course, but evidence points to an increase in the human population from 1 – 5 million people worldwide to a few hundred million once agriculture had become established. And a larger population doesn't just mean increasing the size of everything, like buying a bigger box of cereal for a larger family. It brings qualitative changes in the way people live. For example, more people means more kinds of diseases, particularly when those people are sedentary. Those groups of people can also store food for long periods, which creates a society with haves and have-nots.

You are in a train, standing at a station next to another train. Suddenly you seem to start moving. But then you realize that you aren't actually moving at all. It is the second train that is moving in the opposite direction. The illusion of relative movement works the other way, too. You think the other train has moved, only to discover that it is your own train that is moving. It can be hard to tell the difference between apparent movement and real movement. It's easy if your train starts with a jolt, of course, but not if your train moves very smoothly. When your train overtakes a slightly slower train, you can sometimes fool yourself into thinking your train is still and the other train is moving slowly backwards.

Here is a spiritual practice that will bring empowerment and creative expansion into your life. Make a list of a number of everyday routine activities that you perform frequently. Include activities that you may consider uninteresting, boring, tedious, irritating, or stressful. The list may include traveling to and from work, buying groceries, doing your laundry, or anything that you find tedious or stressful in your daily work. Then, whenever you are engaged in those activities, let them be a vehicle for alertness. Be absolutely present in what you do and sense the alert, alive stillness within you in the background of the activity. You will soon find that what you do in such a state of heightened awareness, instead of being stressful, tedious, or irritating, is actually becoming enjoyable. To be more precise, what you are enjoying is not really the outward action but the inner dimension of consciousness that flows into the action.

Some biologists have argued that the native/ nonnative distinction is already no longer practically useful, and that adherence to it fosters presumptions about ecological risk that lead to poor management decisions, such as using scarce resources in unlikely-to-succeed attempts to try to control or eliminate nonnative species that are not really ecologically problematic. Advocates of this view propose that instead of evaluating species on the basis of their place of origin, ecosystem managers should focus on the actual impacts that they are having on the system, as well as on whether they have traits that make them likely to diffuse rapidly through disturbed or highly dynamic ecological systems. Moreover, they emphasize that the organism and group traits that foster rapid diffusion of a species population under those conditions, and therefore are indicators of a population's likelihood of becoming ecologically problematic, are the same for native and nonnative species. Therefore, they conclude, knowing whether a species is native or nonnative does not provide much, if any, pertinent information about its likely future ecological impacts.