Looking at Life Through a Shattered Lens of Perception

What is this thing called "Life?"

(Here, have a musical accompaniment while you read)

How did we get to hold the beliefs we hold about how we got to be who we are, and where we are in life, at this precise moment?

What shaped us? Did someone else "do it," or did WE "do it," or was there some otherworldly guiding hand that led us?

What is our perception, as we try to answer these questions? And how does that perception line up, in the face of the tangible facts?

How do we "spin" our own stories?

Are we the hero? Or the villain? Or are we more like a passive bystander in the making of our own lives?

Would we do it any differently, if we could take our current insights back in time to some prior point of our choosing... and try again, from there?

Would it improve things, or would we simply "screw it all up again," albeit in a different fashion, making new mistakes, but mistakes, nonetheless?

What if we were to look back and sincerely determine that the "insertion point" we'd want to go back to starts with "I wasn't born to THESE parents!"

What would it say about us, and our perception of our lives if — in fact — our "do over" is our entire lifespan to date?

What If You Could Undo Your Damage?

It's impossible to go through life and not take on "damage," in one way or another. Let's face it, the moment we step outside our front door, we expose ourselves to the potential for damage; to being judged; to be found lacking in some way; to be hurt.

As the saying goes: "Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional."

What if your life actually wasn't all that "hard?" What if our perception of "hardness" were actually more like "a walk in the park," in the greater scheme of things?

What if the life you lament as being so difficult in reality was a "charmed" life?

@cosmictriage and I often have some odd and interesting conversations!

The other day, we found ourselves considering the lives we would/might have had, if the trauma (very real and tangible) we both experienced had not happened.

Who would we be?

How would our lives have unfolded?

In a sense, it's a variation on the 1998 film "Sliding Doors" which also explored how a single event in someone's life happening/not happening sets up two completely different outcomes.

Some might look at such speculation and immediately label it "stupid" and "a waste of time," because there's ultimately nothing we can do about the past; our history has already happened, and has already been written... in indelible ink.

So why dwell on it?

But sometimes, using our imaginations can be an important healing tool, because in order to change something horrible from the past — even if only in this imaginary game — we have to accurately remember the specific wrongs to be righted... and thereby we move them from the realm of "something vague but definitely horrible" to something more specific and tangible.

Reminds me of that famous line from the movie Cold Comfort Farm: "I saw something nasty in the woodshed!"

Sometimes the Past is an Illusion...

The memories of our past traumas and hardships can take on legendary proportions and gain a life of their own. Well, at least sometimes... some things will always be brutally horrible no matter what.

However, when it happens that we build a legend around a negative event, we use these "legends" as reasons and rationalizations for all manners of things, from bad behavior to repeated failures to refusing to engage in certain activities to even avoiding certain conversations.

It is also said that it is the trauma and downturns in life that "shape our character," but whereas that might well be true, we must pause and ask ourselves whether or not that is actually a positive shaping of character?

If an event indeed enables your ability to "overcome and get on with life," is that still a good thing, if that event also fills you with latent anger, hostility and resentment?

What if that hostility rains down on someone whose differently wired psyche perceived that same event completely differently?

Who would YOU be, absent your core trauma? Would you even want to know?

Postscript: I realize this post is a lot more "experimental" and "ethereal" than my usual fare — just trying something a little different; revisiting a style I often followed in my earliest days of blogging (late 1990's).

Thanks for visiting, and have a great week ahead!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2023-07-23 19:03 PDT
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