Wednesday, July 24, 2024

What lies beyond the perception?

 July 24, 2024

I streamed a documentary this past weekend entitled “I Am: Celine Dion”. Beyond a doubt this was one of the most powerful films I have ever watched.

Years before, I found myself asking a question—not expecting any response—but more or less a question asked of the cosmos, wondering what the answer would be to: how would one even navigate such a circumstance? The question arose in the aftermath of the tragedy that befell another great singer, one who’d undergone what should have been a simple surgery to remove nodules from her vocal cords. The result of that surgery was the destruction of Julie Andrew’s amazing, four-octave singing voice.

Now here is another great singer, a woman whose voice I have loved since the first time I heard it, when she was a teenager coming into her own in the Canadian music scene. No surgery this time, but it turns out that hers is a one to three persons in a million disease—Stiff Person Syndrome. The spasming of muscles—all muscles can be susceptible—that, in her case, restricts the ability of her body to produce sound. As she said in the documentary, her lungs are working, but the muscles surrounding her lungs restrict what happens with them.

To have been given such a gift—a once in an infinity kind of a voice—and then to have it gone. Or if not gone, perhaps closed off? Like a brick wall suddenly appearing and preventing a voice from being fully reached, being fully used, being fully heard. What must it be like to suffer such a turn, such a change, such a loss? Even on top of the incredible physical pain that must be endured when one’s muscles suddenly spasm and lock. (I’m sure you’ve had a charley horse. Now imagine every muscle in legs, arms, chest having a charley horse at the same time.) Surely, it is a loss akin to the loss of a dear friend, or companion. Surely the grief, the bereavement must be close to unbearable.

I don’t know if I can think of a more apt description of hell than to have been given something precious, something that you loved beyond measure, and then to have that something so viciously torn away.

As I pondered all these things and as I watched that documentary, I understood how very much we as human beings truly have in common with each other. While we are going through the tough times, the emotions we experience, the kind of suffering that perhaps isn’t visible to the eye of others, is something with which we can all identify.

What happens to famous people isn’t any different than what happens to the rest of us. We are all human beings, and our individual stories are simply human stories. And if we allow it—if we will it—we can use our stories to bring us together.

No, I don’t know what it’s like to suddenly lose the ability to celebrate a God-given talent; but I do know what it’s like to lose a God-given child.

I may not have lost an ability that allowed me to do something I deeply loved, but I have lost a house to fire. Two houses, in fact, in my case.

If we strip things down to their most elemental core, we are all far more the same than we are different. I believe that the problem we have, as people who are so much the same, in getting along,  can be traced to our perceptions.

These days, it’s a common saying that perception is reality. And perhaps it is, in the way our emotions interpret them. Kind of like when you look at the weather report and it tells you, “It’s 80 but feels like 110.” The truth is, it’s 80. The perception is it feels like 110.

I wonder if it could be useful for us to take time, especially when we experience those emotions that unsettle us, to ask ourselves if we can get to the point where we can look beyond the “feels like” portion of the program.

When something is said to us that immediately spikes an emotion—especially a negative emotion—could we take a mental time out and ask, “Is what I heard exactly what was said?” The first few times, I’m thinking that is an exercise we will have to do, post-moment, as it were. It might depend on the speaker; or more probably, on our perception of the speaker.

But if we could manage it? If we could say to our emotions, yes, you have validity. Now, let’s take a moment and look beyond that.

In time, the result may be that we are able to bring down the temperature of our rhetoric. If we can learn to look beyond the emotions of the moment, perhaps we will be able to more clearly see how our fellow citizens truly are more like us than we have thought them to be.

We are all human. I hope that someday soon we can all realize that fact and get on to the more important challenges in life.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

https://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury


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