“It is not what you look at matters, it is what you see” – Thoreau

We live in many different versions of reality and minds. We exist quite differently in worlds and it is hard to convince someone of your truths even with verbal and non-verbal modes of communication. People tend to see a version of you and shape their understanding based on it. Many instances can prove and disprove a fact about this understanding but it is hard to break a bias. That is as inevitably human as existence and death. 

Photo by JOHN CALLERY on Pexels.com

Facts don’t prove anything until you choose to see them as evidence. People constantly provide clues about themselves but it is our choice to accept that to be the truth or not. Hence, our perception is usually limited and fixed at a particular moment. To rid ourselves of the biases we carry, we need to indulge others and ourselves to gather more data about them so as to form their supposedly “true” personality. The projection of a person may or may not be “true” but it does speak about what the person wants to build themselves to be. This could be a means to an end or it could just be a journey from projecting to becoming. 

I usually try to see people for how they treat others who can’t do anything for them. But, this itself has become so widely acknowledged that it still remains hard to judge them for this because of their awareness of being judged on this basis. It is a bane to be this observant and still lost at the same time. It is about all these signs that point towards varied directions and make you as lost as a non-observant one. 

It is in the end best to acknowledge Thoreau’s titular quote that we might never be able to look and grasp the totality and the whole truth. We will either be skimming the edges or else we might be simplifying the absurd complexity thrown at us in human shape. Either way, we are being forced into interactions by unimaginable forces in an experiment or rather for pure enjoyment. I usually feel like all of my intuitions are just my uncontrollable actions that are driving me. Intuition could very well be my unconscious assessment of things that hasn’t actually found acceptable language to articulate itself. It is frustrating to grapple with reality. It is easier to accept that we just see and can never look.