Thoughts On… Reality

Think of where you are at a particular moment, and how you feel. From laying under the starry skies, driving down the highway at night with the wind blowing in your face, listening to the sounds of humanity along the boardwalk; such things all bear a particular emotion that becomes one and the same with the place where you experienced it. Thus memories become synonymous with an emotion, and an emotion synonymous with a memory. Such a phenomenon helps to define our perception of our worlds at a point in time. Standing in the middle of the street the other night I watched as a couple shared a romantic moment in the moonlight. As the stars and the lights shone brightly above, this single frame of time became their snapshot of reality. To this couple, this particular point in time bore only love, created by their perception of the world. As a bystander I saw a much more broad and unbiased view of the true reality.

Scan out from the couple standing in the shadow of the apartment, and my friend could be seen urinating in the bushes, while in the house next to me another friend was in an argument with his father. The juxtaposition that this situation presented was so clear and made me think of how every experience in the world is perceived literally one second at a time. Emotions truly are a product of our situation and environment. If our reality is based on our perception of an experience and our experiences are derived from how we process our emotions, then reality is truly only existent in the exact present moment that it is experienced. If we are not around to experience a situation, than the reality is not real and hence non existent to us. Only what we experience is real. Chris McCandless once put this in another perspective by saying “happiness is only real when shared”. This raises a strange question, a theory really. If there is no one with which to share an experience, does the reality of it truly exist? It is a question that is hard to answer, but if we are truly only existent in the here and now, then to anyone else who is in a different point of space at that point of time will realize that that specific reality does not exist and hence reality is only real when shared.

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