Reality is in the Creation.

 Is it possible that we actually dream in black and white, and the colours we see are just pigments of our imagination?

“Travel is a great cure for ignorance.”

Today’s random titbit is about reality—what it is, who decides it, and whether we all live in completely different versions of it.

(Fair warning: the word “reality” is going to appear far too often.)

Let’s start at the beginning. When we’re born, we don’t have much understanding of anything. Our first guides are our parents (and those around us). They get a good few years to influence our “reality” before friends, teachers, peer pressure, TV, and—especially now—social media join the party and help shape our personal worldview.

I believe (which does not make it true, because it’s just my reality) that even if you gave 100 newborns the exact same upbringing, the same teachers, the same friends—those 100 children would still grow into 100 different people with different ideas and perspectives. Sure, they’d share lots of similarities. They might support the same football team, like many of the same things… but they’d react differently to different moments and experiences.

To speed this up: a small community, despite having plenty of different personalities, will usually share a similar set of views—similar ideas of history, similar understandings of right and wrong, and roughly the same values.

But if you take 100 people raised in rural Ireland, 100 in Dublin city, 100 in Mexico, 100 in Kenya, 100 in New York, 100 in Finland… what are the chances they’d agree on anything? There are thousands upon thousands of “realities” out there. Different religions, different norms, different versions of what’s right, wrong, important, or true.

Let’s use history as an example.

Q1: Isn’t most of what we are taught, whether in school or at home, really just someone’s opinion? After all, nearly everything comes from a book, and every book is written from a particular perspective.

Q2: If you and I watched the exact same movie and then wrote reviews separately, would they match? Of course not. They might overlap, but they’d still be personal understanding, opinions, our own “realities.”

Conflicts and wars throughout history, and even today, both small playground arguments, and on the grand scale, World Wars, often boil down to clashing opinions of reality.

The Conclusion:     We can either stay content with the reality we have inherited, or we can spread our wings, immerse ourselves in new cultures, absorb other histories, religions & traditions, and ultimately shape our very own realities.