Silly Patterns
I Don’t Suffer From Pareidolia
It’s all in fun
In a flurry of activity, all in the same week, friends started to send me a copy of this article:
Okay, it could have been a different article, but similar. Regardless, I told the first friend that sent it to me that it was funny, and would be even better if there had been any actual words to read instead of 5 billion ads for various things no one cares about.
Apparently, the article is making the rounds on Facebook. And my friends know I’m “afflicted” since most of my social media posts on Instagram are personal sightings, such as the fireplace photo that is the lead into this article.
It’s so nice of them to share because, before this week, I had no idea that there was an official name for the “condition”.
I had wondered for years though, when I looked out into the world and saw faces in the sidewalks, in the trees in the forest, in floor tiles, buildings’ ceilings and floors — just about everywhere I looked — if I was the only odd person who saw these faces.
Imagine my delight when I found a whole community on Instagram who also spotted them everywhere! WOW — my “tribe”!
Hashtags like #iseefaces, #iseefaceseverywhere, #facesinthings, #facesinplaces, #facesinobjects, #iseefacesinthestrangestplaces became my new favorites.
Going for my daily 6-mile walk quickly became a new game for finding new faces to share.
There are benefits with finding stationary faces in things. They are frozen images. They just beg a story be told about that face, which is a perfect exercise for a writer. They don’t evoke any personal emotional response, which is also great for the highly sensitive personality. That’s great for me since I am one of those types of people.
A friend of mine mentioned to me in a mildly derisive tone, that I seemed obsessed with these images, almost inferring that I might have a mental disorder. I told her that it was like a Rorschach test and that some people believe that if you don’t see patterns, it’s a sign of mental illness. That seemed to satisfy her uneasiness.
I didn’t tell her that the Rorschach testing method itself is subject to a great debate about its validity. Hey, anybody can Google and do their own vetting.
About the point that the third person sent me the “article”, I looked carefully again at the title, “Are you SUFFERING from Pareidolia?” and realized that the response to my friends was simple.
When you look out into the universe and you see smiling faces everywhere, even in the inanimate, there is no suffering there. There is only the joy of having the universe smile at you.
Related 30-second Haiku based on real life:
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