Life Lessons #2 : Perception Versus Truth

Happy New Year Readers! 
May 2018 be all you hope for and dream about.

Here is a short piece of writing I created a few months ago for our monthly writing group under the theme of  'A Mysterious Container'. Enjoy!

Mysterious opened her eyes.

She felt strange, different somehow.

Her whole being ached and tingled with pins and needles.

Confined to a tight, dark space, a haloed green sheen reflected about as much light as a festival glow stick.

‘Where am I?’ she wondered, smelling the sickly sweet goop that maintained her supine position. Encamped in the jelly-like substance, Mysterious inhaled. Sampling a deep swig of syrup, she gulped. It wasn’t half bad.

‘Mm mm…Best pace myself. I could be stuck here for a while.’

Cooped up in the dingy surrounds, her vision remained blurred. Boundaries obscured and faded, sometimes clashing as Mysterious strived to focus. With little else to do but think, a rhetorical question played over and over on the turntable of her mind.

‘How did I get here?’ the broken record continued to bump and repeat- a perpetual echo.

‘What am I doing here?’

Mysterious remembered a long and arduous journey, scaling a veritable mountain.

She recalled the feeling of exhilaration in reaching the pinnacle, then falling into a deep, exhausted sleep.

In her dreams, she writhed and thrashed, as restless as a sugared up child on a rainy winter’s day.

Mysterious’s thoughts leaned towards home, so beautiful and lush until a severe famine had torn through the place, dwindling its resources to nought. Many of her friends and family had been drawn elsewhere, driven to leave.

Happiness, festive feasting and shelter had ceased to exist when the Great Exodus came.

‘Where were they now?’ The perplexed prisoner longed for those days again: To see a familiar face, sup with a loved one, stroll together on a long sultry summer evening.

Her brother, Devious, had surreptitiously vanished, just a few nights before. Normally, he would assert himself to dominate the lion’s share of the day’s rations. Oh well, plenty left since he’d gone.

Mysterious felt weightless - an astronaut defying gravity. She lay still in the foetal position, locked rigid in one spot, as if caught in the Dead Sea. She attempted a gentle stretch but could barely move.

Limited to a slight turn of head in either direction, she searched for any sign of weakness in the ashen walls. Any possibility of escape and she would not hesitate.

As the fluids around her gradually depleted, the waves no longer pitching when her barracks swayed, Mysterious noted a worn, etched patch. A minute dot of light shone through the uppermost corner. She gingerly edged nearer to the spot – this planting of hope bubbling up inside of her. She lingered - a tightrope walker, her own life ambassador, slow and steady.

‘I can do this. I am an Overcomer!’

Summoning every ounce of strength, she gently chipped away her structural surrounds. A sharp stream of white light, pierced through the opaque room and warmth struck her.

Mysterious recoiled from the shock, though deep down there was something comforting and pleasurable about it.

‘It’s okay. This is good’ Self-assurance spurred her on as she imagined what freedom would look like, feel like, taste like.

Drilling through the escape hatch, she found herself immersed under an umbrella of azure-blue.

She hung from a lucid, glass elevator, shimmering and rocking like a grand chandelier.

Her head felt giddy. A glorious feeling of wellbeing flooded her adrenaline-pumped body.

Ever so gently, repetitively, Mysterious stretched and retracted every limb, and part, popping each nerve connection until the blood flow completely returned.

‘Just a little more. Just a little more’.

A sudden gust of wind surged underneath her.

‘I can do this’. Underpinned by a renewed feeling of confidence, Mysterious sprung from her pogo-stick legs.

As Mysterious alighted upon the soft platform of vibrant purple petals, her newly formed tongue unspooled revealing a ready-made straw. While siphoning nature's nectar-rich energy drink, her agitated appendages fanned gently up and down.

With one final manoeuvre, Mysterious took flight. Her dainty terracotta and jet-black hang-glider wings soared strong and true. The white- alabaster bordered dots flashed a Morse-coded message.

‘Nothing will ever contain me again.’

c.  Monique Wiles   26.10.17  

Photo : Monique Wiles 2018 - First chrysalis of the season

I share this story to illustrate the difference between perception and reality or truth.

What did you think was happening to Mysterious? 

Where was she while placed in this precarious predicament?

What in reality was her truth? What did you perceive it to be?

In this age of social media and relying on computational communications, I often observe and sometimes get caught up in misunderstandings of what is being said or how it is being said. It's a bit like telephone calls in the 'old days', ( yes I had a 3 figured phone line with a crank, as a child)- the party lines would cross over and  several threads of unrelated conversation would meld together.

Without facial expression, tone of voice, body language cues, social ( appropriate) touch or other gestures, one is left to decipher and come to their own conclusions how to read between the lines.Our choice of words, in fact, only makes up approximately 10 -20 percent of our  total communication, yet online,without visual cues, this is skewed to 100%, 90% if you include emojis.Our perception, interpretation and understanding of  a limited set of chosen words can cause a chain reaction or a snowball effect which can either be of benefit or leave damage in its wake.

Social media has its place, fabulous for families and friends geographically spread.Online buy and sell or information-sharing can be a quick and easy solution. Let's face it we live in a digital age but how much is too much? Why do teens and tweens use their thumbs more than their voices? Isolation and hiding behind screens should not be the default. Trolls and spammers are prevalent, cyber bullying and high anxiety and stress levels rampant, more than ever before, amongst our young people and smartphone users.

Selfies rule, sometimes to the detriment of common sense safety. An artificial blanket of security wraps the Selfie addict until the photoedit wears thin and the eternal negativist begins to taunt and the nagging voice returns: ' not good enough'.

How does this whole new technological  world our children live in ( let's call it the Digital Age) relate to butterflies anyhow? 

I have just learned today that the Māori word for butterfly is kākahu, meaning cloak. And that the scientific name for Monarch Butterfly is Danaus Plexippus  meaning 'sleepy transformation'.

(source : https://www.mitre10.co.nz/gardenclub/article/monarch-butterfly). Great, informative article by the way.

Photo : Monique Wiles 2017 - A sleepy transformation

Perception vs reality is cloaked in the relevance and context of our own experiences, emotions and sensory operations. Just as you would have interpreted my story, above, based on your understanding of the words used, the tone of the story and your own experiences - perhaps of feeling isolated, trapped or confined in some way or even something else you had watched or read, whether imaginary or real- perception builds by emitting signals through your nervous system, often occuring unconsciously.

Gathering all possible informational and communication cues, in their totality, are therefore crucial to building upon truth and the reality of a situation rather than jumping to conclusions or erratic decision making simply based upon an individual's perception.

Remember too, that as humans, we all have intrinsic motivations and expectations which will likely brightly colour or mottle grey our perception of a situation, as we see what we want to see, perhaps excluding or blocking those  details we don't want to see or accept. Yet again, as uncomfortable as it may be, especially when making the big decisions or facing the most difficult situations - trapped, confined, limited, we must grasp the total picture, face the forward view and continue to live in hope.I challenge you this year, whatever is going on in your mysterious world, unwrap the cloak, awake from your sleepy transformation and embrace the view.

"Just a little more, just a little more ... nothing will ever contain me again."

Photo : Mikayla Wiles 2018 - First butterfly of the season - uncloaked