Donald Skiff

The Hitchhiker Donald Skiff

What makes us human? We know that few other species share with us some of our most valued experiences, such as our ability to perceive and respond to the emotional states of others. Today's technologies remind us of our remarkable ability to deduce even some of the most subtle relationships in our environment, yet much of what we experience is still mysterious to us. We love to construct grand theories of how things work. Questions, from "the meaning of life" to "does she love me?" occupy our thoughts whenever we lift our heads from the daily grind of survival. It's often when something changes that we notice the ground that we've been walking on. Our personal narratives, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, become disjointed without our being aware of it until an event, or another person, comes along to remind us that we could have done things differently.