I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a freelance gig I’m working on. Collaborating with a friend to put together a book. I sat in on a meeting yesterday with a woman from a book publisher the organization currently works with. The conversation that took place got my mind spinning on this book and a myriad of other stuff that goes with it. Pieces of things I’ve read on writing book proposals and marketing trends began to make clearer sense as the meeting progressed. I was excited and busting with ideas and questions afterward. There was enough fodder in that meeting to keep me going for a week or more.

But my boss came away with a vastly different package. At least that’s the impression I got after talking with him about the meeting for a bit.

It fascinates me how two people can witness/participate in the same event and come away with two totally different takeaways and perspectives on what was accomplished. For me, the back-and-forth dialog stirred my creative juices, gave me ideas not only for the project we were talking about, but also my freelance project — and even to things beyond those. For him, well, he seemed to come away just as frustrated and concerned as when he went in. I may be reading him wrong, but that’s what I got from our brief conversation.

I wonder, am I just a weird thinker? Do I live in a dreamland while my boss lives in reality? This kind of thing happens to me enough in life that I’ve come to accept I just don’t see the world the way most people do. For a while I tried to change my view, so I could see as they see. But to no avail. Just as in a parallax lens, my view is askew.

I’ve come to accept this fact in me. But I don’t understand it. Nor do I think of it as a good/bad or right/wrong issue. It just is what it is. I know I come by it naturally. I can’t remember a time in my life where my view wasn’t askew from the rest of the world. But even so, it still blows my mind how different my view from everyone else.