Perception

I've always heard that if you wanted to change the world, your environment, or your situation, you have to start with how you think; change your perception.

With a new year, new goals, new resolutions, and entering a new phase in my life, I'm focusing on changing my perception.  I choose to look at the beauty around me, hope for it, desire it, and want it.  I'm talking about the beauty of love, the beauty of life. 

I have a choice: I can remain in the shadows and let the cold continue to seep into my bones, causing me to huddle into a tight ball, shutting out the world around me - or else look up and let the sun warm my face and melt the ice in my heart. 

The world sucks.  People suck.  Life, on most days, suck.  It's one struggle on top of the other.  It sucked when I lived in the perception of safety and security busy fulfilling the American dream - the picture-perfect life; it sucks now when that dream has shattered into a million tiny pieces.  The prospects of tomorrow and the next day suck too.  BUT, it doesn't have to be ugly. 

I choose to see the beauty in every day.  I choose to see a single red flower growing amongst a concrete jungle.  I choose to see a simple smile amongst a world of zombies.  I choose to sing as I toil, labor, and struggle.  Will singing magically make my troubles go away? No, but at least my ears will hear something pleasant and my heart feel a little lighter. 

Today I change my perception.  Let the world be damned and the pessimists be fools.  The sun has risen and beyond the gray clouds, the falling snow, the bitter winds, and I know she burns brightly.  With my mind's eye I see her, and in seeing her, the clouds break.

Don’t want to take my word on perception, here are few words concerning the power of perception from other writers:

"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow stronger." - W.B. Yeats 

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” - William Blake

“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” -  Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” - Aldous Huxley

“Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.” - Albert Einstein

"Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way."  - Charles Bukowski

"I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted."  - Jack Kerouac

Till next time,

~T.L. Gray