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Thursday Apr. 25, 2019

We too often grab, hold tight and cling to distorted views, fiction vis-à-vis reality.

I mean, just as we sometimes find our reality feels bizarre, scratching heads saying, “you can’t make this stuff up”. Sometimes fiction reveals us, touches something deep within which is real which we’ve suppressed or ignored. When we see, hear or read it, it resonates. Scares us a bit to think those elements are within us. We could dismiss them as ‘just good fiction’, but when things hit close, when deeds of some dark character align with our own experience, memory or self-image it can be unsettling. One person’s imagination can be someone else’s reality. That trigger might be poem line, movie scene or song lyric. Drives deep into us like scalpel, like lightning bolt – or both.

Not to suggest our reality is fabricated. We would all be liars if we didn’t admit sometimes we show what we want people to see, reveal what is convenient and leave out or hide that which is inconvenient.

What someone said or did or meant has multiple meanings. What was said or written (and its intent), what was heard or received (how it felt to us) and how it appeared to anyone watching.  This learning is reinforced for me every time I do a speech that isn’t routine repetition of something familiar but when it involved digging deep to derive energy and motivation from something I feel important. Important to me at least, but too often I misjudge how meaningful or clear or important those feelings and that message might be for my audience.

Situations and conversations get messed up all the time when we say or mean one thing and someone else hears something completely different – this is neither new of solvable with any skill I have, but it seems to me the bigger tangle exists in our own heads. My sense, if this is happening to you, is to ignore the people you are tangling with and deal instead with the tangle in your own mind. Writing it down helps, I’ve found, and within it is great fictional fantasy – dreams that will never come true in real life but make very readable fiction because you can make this stuff up …
 
Reader feedback:

HAPPY TODAY
Let me think about it. I need to learn this :), AG, Cancun, Mex.

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