Perception

They say hind sight is twenty-twenty, but is that really true, can you really see the past through clear eyes or are we really just wishing we would have been looking for the right signs and opportunities the first time around? Life is an experience, how else can it be described? Through our eyes we experience the colors of creation, with our ears we hear the heartbeat of the earth, and using our bodies we choose to connect with these things. We touch what see, and feel what we listen to. Is it a choice or are we just going through motions? We are creatures of habit, but is not everything in creation? The graceful lioness hunts because it needs to eat, the mighty oak grabs up the sun so that it may grow strong, but what do we do? 

Seeing is believing.
We believe what our eyes have seen, we know that it's true, we have seen it. Habit. Throughout all of time mankind has set full reliability on the use of our eyes. I remember the first time I saw a magician, I was totally transfixed on what he could do, I believed that he could read minds, see through solid objects, defy gravity, even throw physics right out the window. I believed that it must be true, I had seen it with my own two eyes. As I grew older I discovered that it was all just an illusion. So I wondered to myself, how can we believe our eyes when they can so easily be deceived? We can look at everything in life, but how can we ever know what is true? We must train our eyes to see around the illusion, to seek out the truth. We must question our perception, throw it into the light and take a good look. Perhaps its not just that we have been the victim of some elaborate illusion, rather we have only seen what we wanted. Tunnel vision, when our eyes only see what we are focusing on. When I first started running, I would have in my mind one goal, go this far or meet this time, all I could do was look out at the path I ran and see that it just kept going. It was horrible, I never felt like I got anywhere. I only saw what I focused on, the boring path which caused me pain, until one day I saw a doe out in the forest that I ran every morning. She was beautiful, elegant and oblivious to my presence. I stopped and realized for the first time I had been doing it all wrong, I had let my eyes only see the pain and distance that I had to endure. From then on I started looking at the world through which I ran, and found that it was a beautiful ever-changing world. From then on I've never had a problem running. I widened my gaze to see what I was really looking at, and realized that my perception was all wrong. When we look for only what we think is there, it is what we are sure to find. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, because we realize, we were not seeing what we were shown. Look around, open your eyes, the world is full of beauty and truth. We need only to look for it.

Are you even listening?
How many times do we catch ourselves hearing what's going on but never listening to a thing that has been said? Do we truly understand the power of sound? How you hear something said can drastically change the meaning of the words that you listen too. Going through basic military training really opened my ears to grasp the meaning behind what we say to one another. Military training instructors use their words and control the way they say them to test people, to see if they can perform under pressure. Listening to what they are saying beneath how they are saying it is the key that everyone, who has made it through, grasps sooner or later. Extracting the meaning of the words that we are hearing is the most essential part of listening that truly allows us to understand exactly what a person means. There have been plenty of times in my life when I've gotten in arguments only to here them ask if I'm even listening to what they are saying. Truthfully, I wasn't, I was more concerned with how they were saying it that I only listened to the words they used. I have come to understand that the words that people use are not always what they want you to hear, they want you to know what they mean. The only way to do that is truly listen to what they mean by those words. Sound plays such a huge part in our lives not only in communication but how we feel as well. Have you ever watched a horror film without the sound? The fear factor is completely removed. The images can be the most terrifying in the world but it's through the sound of the film that our emotions are controlled. Listening to what is going on around us can also change how we feel about the place we are in. Out of silence I have heard more than any conversation I have ever had. Just taking the time to sit and truly hear what's going on around me has allowed me to realize that there is so much more to life then the simple work play sleep and eat routine. We clutter up the silence with noise so that we don't have to worry why things are so quite. When I was trekking through the Himalayan mountains of India I found the silence, at first, a bit unsettling. There were no machines at work, no cars speeding through the city, there were no extras to hear. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever heard. Wind gently rolling through the valleys, the water trickling through streams, the pure silence of sound. Peaceful. It was there that I discovered that as we live our lives we get used goths sounds that surround us and we never take the time to just listen to what we are hearing, the birds singing as they fly through the sky, the wind rushing through the trees. Listening to what we hear and truly understanding it can bring new revelations to our lives. It can help us understand the heart of the people we interact with. It can allow us a peace in Which all else fades away. All we need to do is listen for it.