2015 was a rather tumultuous and challenging year for me. But since hardship and failures are necessary stepping stones of success, 2015 could have been seen as a year packed full of lessons.
As the year is closing and a new year 2016 is about to start, I’d like to share some important points that have significantly affected the way I look at the world in 2015.
Let’s start with Perspective
When someone says how one interprets things depend on one’s perspective, I used to take it as, in a nutshell, different situations bring different interpretations of the same event.
Though that was a fairly accurate interpretation, there is one thing that it overlooked: even under more or less the same situation, different people may still interpret things differently.
And that’s because of the differences in our existing beliefs and the way our brains work. Some people tend to take things literally, others use more indirect methods. Some put truth above all else while others are more “flexible”, etc.
There are always the opposite ideas
It then follows naturally that for every idea out there, there would always people who propose and firmly believe in something exactly the opposite, regardless of how normal, special or crazy the idea is.
This used to baffle me a lot, as I used to believe in the absoluteness of truth – something that can’t be further from reality.
Now I would gladly, or sometimes reluctantly, accept those explanation-defying beliefs as the result of different perspective or personality.
How about the world?
It seems to me that the world we live in is simultaneously real and unreal. The reasons that make our world “real” are obvious: there are material objects that we can touch, there are real people, there are real things. These can’t be all illusions. Just can’t be.
But at the same time there is a really different, very different, but no less significant, world for each of us. It’s the product of a combination of our genetics, upbringings and yes, “circumstances”! This combination is probably unique for each of us, because there are just countless parameters. This combination creates a world, a hidden world, where each of us lives in. A hidden world that actually decides the real world we’re seeing.
And that brings us back to point above on Perspectives. It’s this hidden world that gives the perspective upon which we interpret the world. This hidden world is full of good and bad, of prejudice and magnanimity, full of generalizations from personal experiences.
This world is simultaneously our prison and our shelter. In some sense, it imprisons us, it limits us to the familiarity, to the prejudice that we’ve learned. And in another way, it provides us with identity, with what’s unique and special about ourselves in this real world – it’s our little hidden world.
And I figure, the first step to create a good real word is to acknowledge the differences in our hidden worlds.
Some wishes for 2016
In 2016, I wish all of us a deeper consciousness of our little yet powerful hidden world. And then, we can start listening to it, talking to it, understanding it so as to finally transform it into a place that is less like a prison and more like as a constructive base.
And with that, I believe peace and success will follow all of us.
Wish you a great 2016 ahead!
With love,
Peter Hưng
P/S: I’ll be adding a few new categories to the blog very soon. They add to the list of areas that I’d love to focus on improving in 2016. Stay tuned!
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