I’ve always liked the idea that the world revolves around each individual’s existence; the idea that the reality that each of us have come to know would be completely altered with the addition or subtraction of any life. It’s always given me a falsity of significance, the notion that without me or without my best friend or without my childhood goldfish, the world – my world – would be entirely different.

And there is some sense in that. Without me, my parents wouldn’t have a third child, there’d just be a gaping hole between my oldest and youngest sister. Without my best friend, I wouldn’t know how to speak Macedonian and I wouldn’t be able to comprehend the act of putting someone else’s happiness before your own. Without my childhood goldfish, I wouldn’t have known how to look after another life and I wouldn’t have learned that goldfish can actually die from being over-fed.

I had this entire thought process on the train into uni while I was avidly reading “Blood in the Gutter”, by Scott McCloud, who suggests that we all perceive the world in a certain way as a result of the experiences of our sensory systems and that our perception is fragmented by what we know is real and what we think is real. McCloud is essentially proposing that the world outside of our own personal experiences ceases to exist if we don’t notice it or have an awareness of it.

Which is a thrilling thought when you consider that we know so little, but there is so much that occurs in the gutters that we simply “fill in”: there is so much knowledge that we could attain if we only paid attention.