Often times during my seemingly aimless musings I stumble upon the sort of thing that seems obvious, that I never took the time to really take into account. And lately, I’ve been struck by the fact that when you think about it, your entire life is in your head. Your reality is purely a construct of your mind that you build from what you choose to take from your experiences with the environment around you. You’re making it up as you go along. All your fears and your beliefs and your strengths and weaknesses take root in your mind from your interactions with the world.
I can’t perfectly articulate my thoughts on the matter but let me start by saying, it makes me feel a little silly for letting some of the things that happen get to me so much when ultimately I’m in the driver’s seat watching this great mystery of life unfold before me. I can go anywhere I want to, but I’m letting the environment shape my thoughts and feelings which in effect confuses my sense of direction.
I know there’s a lot to take into consideration and I wish I had the vocabulary to express all of it but isn’t it amazing that everything that’s real to you is only real because of how you perceive it in your mind? You have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes. You can have something all the way confused but in that moment, it means whatever it means to you because of how you choose to feel about it. Or, because one can argue that we don’t choose how we feel about anything- how you interpret it.
In conclusion, I’ve found that any one person’s reality is nothing but a perfectly constructed illusion of nothing and everything that’s neither here nor there that doesn’t mean anything and means everything all at the same time because of the level of thought and feeling we assign to it, affected in part (albeit a great part) by how everyone else around us shapes and perceives their reality and the resulting collective reality.
It strikes me that the world in itself is free of any of the meanings we as humans assign to it. It’s just something that’s there, somehow. A wonderful, great big something. Until we come in with our self-awareness and give it supposed meaning.
And as much as I’d want to damn the entire human race to a hell that may or may not exist purely in our minds for the failings of human nature, I realize that this is a necessary and inevitable aspect of how we evolve. You have to marvel at the ability of the human mind to find meaning in the meaningless and create, out of this, something truly amazing.
To end, all I’m just going to say is, we have our failings as a species but… opposable thumbs are still pretty awesome.