Sunday, March 18, 2018

Mind VS Reality




As young kids with minds undiluted and uncluttered with life’s many experiences, we took pleasure loading ourselves up with images derived from ...stories told us, from books we read, and from all other sources within reach – from newspapers and magazines. And yes, from movies, too.

Our malleable and active minds created a world of our own, unlimited and unhindered by realities that we still had to experience. In such a world of Technicolor grandeur, reality took on almost surreal qualities. Everything perceived in our minds were heightened to degrees limited only by the blurred boundaries of our childish dreams. In that world, places in the world visited by relatives, or friends, or pictured in magazines and books, were like paradise, and populated by extraordinary people likened to those inhabiting our celluloid world.

And many of us grew up nursing those stupendous memories, mesmerized by the consuming fantasies they conjured in our minds. As layers of real life experiences were inevitably added, slowly the fantasies were stripped from our minds and we began to see the world in its real colors and dimensions. Our blinders removed fleshing out our realities with more mundane tones and details, not much different from the everyday lives who were used to living in our own little world.

So the local places which we visited and had grown to find either quite boring or trivial, or just ordinary, are now installed as equals and could compare grandly with the new and foreign places that we had begun to live in or visited. Our amazing realization that these places or peoples that we had visited turn out to be not much different from those that we were born with and shared the years.
 
The whole globe after all is not that diversely disparate in its parts. The beaches in Bali, or Hawaii, are no different from the local beaches we had frequented as kids. The skyscrapers in Makati or Manila, or even now in Cagayan de Oro are not really that much more awe-inspiring from the others, even those in differing degrees of development. Size and height are the same anywhere in the physical world.

For the images attached then while still looking majestic or surreal, thanks to the wonders of photography and the various editing tools available, we can look no farther than where we stand and live, all the days of our lives. To savor whatever excitement and grandeur we decide to invest them with.

Wake up! This temporal world satiates our arguably unfathomable thirst and quest for more.