I had occasion the other day to stop and ponder something that I had seen while doing some incidental reading.

Who was I?

An odd question I suppose, but a valid one. What had caught my attention, was the statement -  Your perception of being you is something that you know exists, but that's also impossible for anyone else to experience, record or feel.

Conversely, how am I perceived by others? 

Robert Burns posed that question in his quote, 'O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!'

That could be discovered individually from friends or others who were capable of tough love and harsh truths, but not the world in general - and it would be specific to each individual perception. Our brain never stops processing input from the senses - returning to us our own perception of reality at any given moment.

But in processing that input, it also edits the data as it scans through internal input from different departments; emotions, memory, etc. This is to smooth out the non-stop, massive rush of input, and deliver a clean version of whatever we are experiencing at the time. So, even our sensory perceptions are not necessarily external 'reality', but more, an internal construction.

This process is quite comfortably accepted by each of us, even though our individual perceptions may not agree. Likes and dislikes are an example. What makes those determinations when it comes to, say, food, art, or even people - especially people? What segment of our brain comes into play when we meet someone? Why is our perception of a particular person different from someone else's?

I don't have answers - just questions. And maybe not even the right questions, except that they stem from a lifetime of processing data that suits the physical entity I perceive as me. Most likely not what others see, but close enough to get by in the chaos of so many individual realities.

Just one of those moments when the last dregs of wine drain from the glass, and the sun disappears behind a phalanx of apartment buildings.