NaturallyResilient

About

Have you ever heard of an SEP? We have a running joke in our family about SEPs. SEP stands for Somebody Else’s Problem. The idea was introduced to us in Douglas Adams 5 book trilogy “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe“. In “Life, The Universe and Everything”, Ford Prefect one of the main characters explains an SEP as “something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brains doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem”.

I experienced an SEP first hand. I was living in the country about 12 miles from Georgetown, Texas. Everyday I traveled to Georgetown at least once a day sometime more often. It wasn’t until it came out in our weekly paper that I saw it. A fuel tank from a Saturn V rocket had fallen through the atmosphere to land on earth about 50 feet from the road. The same road I traveled back and forth on to go to Georgetown daily. It had been lying there for 5 days before I saw it! This was hard to miss. It was big. Tour buses started stopping at it. NASA denied it could be theirs; they were sure something that big would burn up when it entered the atmosphere. After about a month, NASA finally sent a crew to look at it and then they agreed it was theirs and they hauled it off.

The mind plays a big part in SEPs. I understand that our mind gets so many sensory inputs that it has to weed through them and only brings out what is pertinent to the situation at hand. How much are we really missing?

My son’s science class did an experiment where you stare at a red spot for a minute then look at a white sheet. The premise is that when you stare at red, the red receptors get tired and shut down and your brain takes over and says you are still seeing red. When you look at the white paper, it takes a while for the red receptors to wake back up and realize the scene has changed but your brain realized you are seeing something else and activates the other receptors while red wakes back up therefore you see green (all the other colors without red).

We kid our teenager about something being an SEP because he doesn’t want to deal with it. But seriously, how many things do we miss in life because it is an SEP?