Realizations

"We Must learn Our Limits. We are all Something, but none of us are Everything." Blaise Pascal

I've realized a few things recently. "Real-ized," - it is an interesting word - to perceive reality. When I realize something it seems to mean that I've been living and acting (and hoping and expecting - and most dangerously of all - Loving) within one impression of reality, and then suddenly discover that impression is not completely accurate. It doesn't necessarily follow that my next impression of reality (my "realization") is any more accurate than my first - but it does mean that I now understand life is not how I understood it to be prior to my realization.

I can't speak for anyone else, but, for me this process of continuous realization - of assessing life and adjusting to the realized is painful. There is nothing comfortable about discovering that things are not what I had believed them to be. I have no great choices when faced with a realization. I can either accept the newly comprehended reality or I can continue on as if I had not experienced the insight hoping to avoid the consequent pain. So, either experience the pain of adjustment or attempt to live delusionally! Both suck - one does result in growth and new opportunities, though.

I would suggest that this concept of realiztion is at its most powerful within relationships. The only experience we have of the world is our own, individual, experience. We can never see the world fully through the eyes of another, can never - directly - experience the hopes, dreams, disappointments, despair or joy of another. The closest approach of experiencing life as another person is through our observation of them, through our own sense of reality, of these reactions in the other. Observation requires some level of relationship, though - and here we bring our own sense of reality into the equation.

This is the point where "realizations" become most operative. Our sense of life necessarily includes our own emotional and spiritual state - these dispositions form the greater curvature of the lens through which we view life, if you will. As an illustration, a tree in full fall foliage - the brightest reds, yellows and oranges caught in a ray of autumn sun - inspires some to love God more deeply and others it drives to greater depths of despair in that they cannot participate in the beauty expressed by nature. Of course, the tree is completely senseless to these reactions - it's just following its nature as a tree. And, the two people in reaction to this scene will look at each other and wonder at the other's reaction. They may realize, at that point, that their individual reactions say more about them then they do about the tree - what does a tree "mean," anyway? This is not to say that there are not appropriate emotional responses to be had - fall foliage ought to evoke a sense peace, at the least. But these scenes will still be refracted through an emotional and spiritual lens - resulting in our own, internal, responses.

I've entered a relationship, recently, that I have been viewing through my own emotional and spiritual state - and I have given very little room for an objective reality of it, or the emotional and spiritual state of the other, to penetrate through to my internal response.

That is my realization. As with all other realizations in my life it is neither "good" nor "bad." It just is.