Along my meander of life, I occasionally feel like I’ve woken to some new colossal perspective of reality.
The world I inhabited before seems distant and somehow amusing to this fresh frame. I would often judge my former self for holding such infantile and delusionary ideas. This new self, standing aloft, pride puffing from an imaginary chest full of novel understandings about the real state of things. Of course, whatever follows will also glance back aghast that I danced with such confidence to beats of great ignorance.
Will I not always be living in a dream of my own creation? Am I departing a deep delusion for a shallower one? Or could I slowly be clawing my way towards an absolute truth?
Let’s illustrate the journey a little to sow some seeds of understanding.
I begin as a cradled foetus, nurtured and fed by a universe not much larger than I. Eventually noises from beyond provoke doubt and suspense of possibilities outside my sight or imagination. A stressful transformation reveals a world beyond indeed. My sensations change, my role shifts, my wealth of understanding crumbles to dust requiring a nervous rebuild. Time and natural ability gift me skills like those I see around. Words and movement come without noticed effort and a small familial kingdom that gives some certainty in the chaos. Rules and ideas fumble their way to my playful ear. Fables and magic are prescribed to myself and others of similar size as functional truths. Gods, Fairies, flying Santas, all paraded with deceptive conformity. These lies fall apart over time with an expectation of jovial forgiveness.
More conventions and collective customs invade my story of me. I’m given ambitions, ideals of pursuit, an identity to shape with optional costumes laid out. As years move me through the schooling of self, I let go of foolish thoughts of youth. I laugh at my silly self of before, now so grand in my beer drinking tit-chasing charade. Parents lose singular shape, now revealed as imperfect creatures of their own confused truths. Notions of the world and history begin to give one some confidence in what’s what. As school comes to a close some are even sure of what career to march towards. Those conventions they nudged our way are ours now. Well-fitting, slightly adjusted for our time and place. I’m set, I’m ready, I’m done with the tight tutelage of distrust. And off I go.
More learning arrives, more unlearning too, but likely a consolidation of my culture’s tune, nothing yet to rewrite. I excel at something, perhaps we might call it overindulging, dressed up as socialising. If all eyes point to glory in unison, I suppose we’re all right. The alternatives never get noticed anyhow. Another growth, more sense of self and truth beyond the nest. More compatriots of discerned pursuits and future lives forming around our freed soles.
These self-titled young adults spring from education’s gates, gilded by their guiltless creators. More truths arrive in a storm. Now on work’s lowest rung, fragile egos easily stung, and meager finances recklessly flung. For many the path is now set, steaming towards death via babies, mortgage, a well-fed retirement, and a life lived without questioning their coagulating norm. Conundrums may arrive along the course, feelings of frustration and betrayal overwhelm the oversold story of a ‘happy life’. Often too late, chained to a course, a family, a failing identity that no longer fits.
What truths do they stumble upon that tell them their life is a lie? Perhaps no truth, other than realising the untruth of what they held true. For those brave or foolish enough to try and change lanes, be prepared to be labeled as loony by those that have paid up for life. Either pulled from the edge, gagged for their own good, or pushed from the doorway, out of sight and mind. The collective kept safe from doubters of their communal truth.
Knowledge gives greatest opportunity for clearer truths, though each presents another layer of perception, only marginally truer than all else. Scientists live in worlds of their particular understanding, their frame of expertise colouring their witnessing of existence. Historians see repeated stories where others are caught by first sighting’s shock. Musicians live through a lens of scores, harmonies and dischords overlapping life’s cacophony of noise. Literaries consume themselves in narratives of others, bringing those characters into their own play, or painting their own interactions with the brush of another’s mind. The social media queen plagued to view exquisite scenes through strangers’ lenses of likes.
How then to reach a truer vision, stuck with our limited frames of reference and experience? Are all that walk in human feet destined to be seared by the same furnace of delusions? However deep we dig for knowledge, can we ever know what distance remains, or whether alternative directions were left unexplored?
First steps demand acceptance of ignorance. See truly the layers of falsehood that litter our perception of self. Allow humbleness to infuse your held sense of what life is or should be. Surrender to the ultimate untruth of your deepest clung to truths.
The peak of knowledge will present itself as a moment of clarity dawns on the ravaged adventurer, calmly considering all that they now know, whispering to themselves, for only their ears care, ‘I know nothing’.
© Louis Oliphant 2020.
Thank you for dropping by. To continue down this peculiar poetic rabbit hole…
