Perception: Maybe It’s Really Nothing

I recently heard this song on the radio which jogged an ancient memory of me lying on my bed with my eyes closed in the dark listening to the entire R.E.M. tape over and over again on my walkman (if you don’t know what this is you are too young to be reading my blog…just kidding!), wallowing in the depths of my teenage angst. Needless to say, I’ve heard and sang along to this song many times. However, I’ve always sang this line like this: ‘If you believe there’s nothing out there to prove, nothing to see’. It was a powerful (now made up) line for me! Oh please tell me I’m not alone here. Did anyone really understand the lyrics as they were originally intended? Personally, my world just got shattered.

And so goes the rest of life as well. Perception is everything, as the saying goes. Sometimes what we might bet our lives on, what we know to our core to be true…sometimes isn’t true at all. For instance, how we see ourselves isn’t always how others perceive us. This past winter I had a long chat online with an old elementary school friend who also shattered my world, in a different way, more like shattered what I always thought to be true of myself. She described me, as she remembered me in those years, in a way I never would have imagined. Flattering words that somehow still make me cringe. Possibly because the contrasting view that I had of myself seems so polar opposite, I just can’t understand how they can co-exist. Those were unsteady years for me—fraught with an incredible sense of insecurity and feelings of not belonging, anywhere. Not as care free as maybe those years should have been. Just like the physical building that no longer stands in its spot anymore—recently torn down—no longer able to recall the ghosts of my past. Unable to use the building to beg my memory to call up old moments of my childhood, I’m now forced to contend with only my memories of those days—but how can I trust myself, duped by my own possibly incorrect perceptions.

As the years go by—as time marches me further away from my childhood—I realize that the recalled memories are the only ones I need in my life at the moment. Perception of our memories might be for our own good, for our own learning. “If you believe” is the lyric, so if you believe does that make it true? Why not! When the moment is right, when the wrong perception is revealed and replaced by another reality, when a memory is shattered—that’s when the truth is meant to be unveiled. The incorrect perception has fulfilled its true purpose, like an unexpected surprise. I don’t know why, but in the case of these lyrics I think I will stick with my original perception, which in some cases can be better than reality. So, if you believe, there’s nothing out there to prove, nothing to see—because when the time is right you will see, and it will prove to serve a purpose—possibly a life lesson in the form of a shattered memory, giving birth to a new reality.

---