~painting by J.T. Thompson

The Hidden

Predicament

in the Living

of Every Day

 

“We do not see the world

 as it is, we see it as we are”.

                      ~Anais Nin

 

We pass certain thoughts like stones

most of which are hardly our own,

but instead, some coagulation of

narrative bits curated closer to home.

 

Our thoughts think themselves

with such a narrow sense of purpose,

they’re writ larger than life as they arrive

solely to help their thinker thrive.

 

We counteract mistaking the world

for ourselves by continuously doubting

our conclusions because uncertainty

of anything is to admit our infallibility.

 

In the mind’s effort to parse

the world, it inadvertently severs itself

from the full spectrum of beauty

which by contrast includes all strife,

tensing us from the tenderness of life.

 

Imagine reducing the unitary wholeness

of the vast universe by selecting one

tiny segment of it and calling it “I”

and narrating life in the role of “my”,

 

A delusional gulf gets created

between things as we think they are

and things as they actually are.

I doubt such a view can take us far.

 

Still, off we go mistaking the real world

we’ve made with our own thoughts

for the real world minus personal faults;

some shadows are born to cast a pall,

and the God’s truth is: that’s not all.

 

Evil and dysfunction or obnoxiousness

occur in proportion to how solidly

a person observes that his projections are

correct and aggressively acts toward that effect.

 

And so it goes: I think, therefore

I’m wrong. My wrongness falls on

someone else’s wrong thinking

leaving us both thinking wrongly

and because so few of us can bear

to think without taking action there

and doing only makes things worse,

I offer the following consoling verse:

 

Best to resist our version of others

as insightful as they might be

because we’ve an invisible axe to grind

and are too for or against to see

or not be biased or unentrenched.

 

Our solution is to deny ourselves

the comfort of always being the same;

one who arrived at an answer

some time ago but takes no blame

or has reason or chance to doubt it

because the world is full of sleepers

who eat, walk, and witness life

without a corresponding conscience.

 

 

04/24/23