Context Shapes Perception: A Life In One Room

I'm sitting on a futon in the spare room of some friends' apartment reminiscing. The walls are a beautiful dark green that is contrasted nicely with the bare wood shelving along the north and south walls. The warm sunlight is just starting to peak around the neighboring building and splash in through the window. I'm thinking about the first time I stepped foot in this room nine years ago. I had just met this beautiful girl, she was like no one I had ever met. She had this unique way of being both warm and friendly while also maintaining a tough and uncompromising authority. She was mysterious and cool and I was awe struck. It took a few weeks, but finally, by sheer chance, the universe brought us together in a social scenario that resulted in her inviting me and my buddy over to her place for a get together with some friends. That night she graced me with our first true one on one moment, in this very room.

For the next four years, we shared this room as our bedroom, then it lived as a storage room, a small living room, several iterations of an office and art studio. It's where I filmed my first YouTube video, built my computer, made the decision to quit drinking. It's where so much of my life and love story with my wife happened.

And now I'm sitting here, reminiscing, remembering when we installed the shelves and painted the walls, as a guest. Today we are visitors to our own apartment in the city we lived in for years.

I was reluctant to come back to the city, even if just for the weekend. In my memories I was focused on the negatives - the traffic, the noise, the crowds - a stark contrast to the peaceful rural life we live now. In those memories anxiety was a guaranteed outcome that was directly related to my proximity to downtown, which is where the apartment is.

So much of our perception is shaped by the context we give it. I've moved from the bedroom now, downstairs and out onto the balcony where I'm sitting and enjoying a beautiful, crisp and cool morning. The city is quiet and I am at peace. Daniela and I got up late and walked a few blocks to grab some coffee and the familiarity of being back here together - somewhere we called home for years - feels in the moment more like a relaxing renaissance than the stressful war zone I remember.

Regardless of whether this feeling comes from knowing our visit here is short or if maybe I have changed in the year since we moved, the fact remains the same. The context i brought with my this morning is different and the result is the same - I never felt this at peace when I lived here because the context of survival always outweighed the context of living. Today I'm here living a good life without the added context of trying to survive and it feels like I'm in a completely different city, experiencing it in a brand new way.

So now I have a new tool in my tool belt that I need to learn how to use properly. Hopefully I will be able to learn how to deliberately reframe the contexts I bring with me in situations with some practice and for anyone reading that has tips for how to do this, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Thanks for reading.