What is REALITY? ~ Storyteller

It sure as hell isn’t what’s on Reality TV.

Reality is created by each individual’s perception of their reality.

We are all the sum of our knowledge and experience during our limited time here on Earth. Our perception of reality is created in our own minds through the mix of our knowledge, emotions, experiences, and the environment we grew up in. They are all completely different! So hence everybody’s view of the world we live in is different. As we grow, learn more, experience more, and learn to cope with things better our realities change. This change can be for the better or worse depending upon what we have been learning and experiencing.

A person living in small town USA, compared with somebody living in Israel, or Tokyo, to London, each person will have a completely different picture of the reality of the world they live in, based off the different experiences and knowledge base needed to survive in the area they are from. As I mentioned, a person’s reality can change, through a multitude of ways from a change in location, learning a new set of skills, a new drug habit, economic conditions, political conditions, or major events in your life.

Major events could be participating in a war, living through a disaster, getting married, getting divorced, having children, getting a degree, taking up prostitution, running guns, selling drugs, committing murder, committing adultery, a death in the family, getting fired, or getting promoted. Each of these and millions of other events can all change your life, adjust your perception of reality at the time, thus changing the way you view the world at any given moment.

What happens when these altered realities collide? When people whose views of a situation and the world we live in today are so radically different and these people run smack dab into each other’s lives, what happens then? Ever watch the news and wonder how in the world some totally inconceivable thing could have just happened? What could drive a person to react in a given manner and affect so many others lives? More often than not because of the negativity of our present day media services mostly what we hear about is the most sensationally worst of what has happened on a given day. In many cases the really bad stuff gets covered up or squashed by people trying to keep a lid on a worse situation in order to keep perpetuating the said situation or to completely hide it from the world.

Great things happen every day, we just don’t hear about those as much. Regular everyday people helping others, acting as angels on Earth reaching out to help others all over the planet every day and you will never hear one eighth of their stories on the news or in the media.

I only write this because as a writer who lives vicariously through my characters, who builds stories on the drama created in my mind of clashing realities and possibilities, who works to give my readers an escape, take them somewhere new they have never been before, and creating realistic made up characters to perpetrate the craziness of my imagination, this is where I live.

There is a new show on television called “Perception”, where Eric McCormack plays Dr. Daniel Pierce and has repeated conversations with his delusion Natalie Vincent, played by Kelly Rowan. The show plays on elements of people’s Perception of Reality.

As a writer, I frequently will have conversations and possible scenes of upcoming books running through my head as if it were a delusion and I was just a casual bystander waiting to record what happened. I’m not crazy, or at least I keep telling myself that, because I don’t actually see my delusions walking and talking around me. Yet I can hear their individual voices, see what they are wearing, the scenery around them. If I don’t like how a scene plays out I have the where with all to rewind in my mind and replay it steering the situations and reactions in the direction I want them to lean towards, which is generally closely related to my initial outline of the stories overall plot. I have to admit that from time to time one of the characters, some fractal of my mind will introduce something I didn’t expect or see coming adding unique and interesting sidelines and subplots to the story. I candidly attribute these moments to my muse and not any psychological malfunctions desperately in of therapy.

I guess my overall point is that as you go about your daily life, working, living, traveling sometimes, to just keep in mind that everybody you run into is going to have a different view or perception of reality than you do. For all the things that we all seem to like and enjoy there are just as many things which can make the other person view things differently than you do. Until you get to know a person, or as the old saying goes, walked a mile in their shoes, experienced what they have you will never understand or relate to their perception of the way things are.

Which has always begged the question in this author’s mind, if you were to lose your mind and go nuts would you know it, or would it just appear as if the rest of the world has lost their mind?

Then that conversely makes me wonder when was the last time you thought everybody around you was going crazy in some slight way?