Reality, wot?

This thing, we call "objective reality" it's a bit weird isn't it? I have some friends who think it's all there is. I guess I thought that too for a while, it's at the base of modern rational thought and the scientific method. And that's what's got us cars and computers and a fridge full of food and central heating and all. And we're encouraged to focus on that, that's the most important bit of the world, isn't it?

But if that's all there is, then what's all this stuff that goes on inside me? This endlessly fractal set of thoughts and feelings and emotions (and that's a pretty rubbish description of my inner world). It seems that we can only take in a tiny slice of what's going on at a time, the rest has to be ignored because it's literally too much to take in. And when I'm writing on the page, I'm just the same, I'm focused down onto each word, each letter as it comes out of my inner world and into this container that you've picked up and are looking at and suddenly something of me is informing you, forming you, maybe you feel repulsion, maybe you feel resonance, maybe you think "this fella's off his nut on something".

It feels like this stuff is in my head, but when I pay more attention to what's going on with my whole body, I get the idea that my head is just a kind of verbal translation place, it's somewhere where the images and the everything get turned into words and sentences (maybe not very cleverly) and then my fingers make these shapes for you to see.

I spent years (you probably did too) in school practicing doing this, making forms with pencil on paper that transmitted something from me to you. Practice and practice and practice, so much that I can't remember it all, every day at school included some writing. Every day of five days a week for thirty-nine weeks of the year betwen the ages of 5 and 18, I spent some time practicing this. With good reason, at the time. Because at the time, there were whole jobs that involved making marks on pieces of paper, these were some of the better jobs! It seems strange now, when "writing" most often means sitting in front of a machine and tapping on keys or on a tiny screen, but it's still the same thing, I'm still taking something from here and now and leaving a mark so that something else can happen later in someone else.

Stuff happens and it gets turned into words in me and then I have learned a way of turning those words in me into recognisable shapes on a page. That's pretty unreal, eh? I mean, really, what is that about? And then we spend years, we've decided sometime ago, that this is a skill that everyone should have and there is great shame for those few who struggle with it or struggle with interpreting the squiggles of others, even if they're printed in a standardised way.

But the world those squiggles exist in, the objective one, the one I can point to and you can point to and we can say, "Yes, that's the same thing!" that's the bit that people focus on and elevate to the most important part of experience even though it's expressing something hugely more complex and shifting, and such a tiny, tiny part of what's actually going on, all the time.