TEST:Pleased to Meet You, Hope You Guess my Name

You don’t know me.

It’s possible, perhaps, with a little research you may be able to get a name and some contact information but you don’t know me. If you knew my face, ever met me or ever even spoke to me for any length of time…you would never know me.

If there is one thing I have truly learned in my less than 40 years on this blue ball in the middle of nowhere, it’s that everyone wants to be right. In one’s quest for ‘right‘ness one will assume many things and refer to these assumptions as facts, or, worse yet, truths. Ones ego will lead them to believe that with a casual conversation they know who you are, you’re type.

You are not right.

I, or anyone else, can tell you anything at all. Lie. Stretch the truth. Who’s truth? Your truth? My truth? It’s not the same. None of it. Who among us can truly claim that we know ourselves? We lie to ourselves every day. What’s to keep us from lying to someone else? You may not even know you are lying but you are.

If nothing is real, nothing can be unreal.

What do you want to hear? How much do I want you to know? How can I change your perception of me? How do I perceive you? This is reality, based on perception, based on…assumption. We assume just about everything. We’ve all been told that when you assume it ‘makes an ass out of you and me’. Yet, we do it every day. Hundreds of times if not more. Why? Because we don’t know the truth. We can’t handle the truth. When it comes down to it, our own individual version of reality is based on perception. What we want to hear and see. What we don’t want to hear and see. We simply create our own realities….because we can’t handle the truth.

What do we really know?

From where I sit, NOTHING. Call it my reality. Yours is different. Perhaps only minutely. Perhaps totally. But it’s different. Regardless. The only thing we know is our own reality. It’s not the ‘truth’. Only an amalgamation of our perceptions however false they may be. We don’t know anything because we are constantly being lied to. You. Me. Everyone. Them. Ourselves. Lies. We are just fooling ourselves and everyone around us. Reality is based on perception. We can misperceive. Already the filter fails. Add to that being misinformed and misled. We assume. We lie. We hear and see more lies. Where do we find our truth?

Where is this going?

I’m like you. I want to know. As petty and hopeless as it sounds, the desire is there. Lie to me. My ego wants to make sense of it. I want to be involved in the endless quest for the truth. I want to know the unknowable. What else is there? Why do we get out of bed every day? I’ve lied to myself and my reality involves me having an unknown and grandiose purpose in this life. This can’t be all. There has to be a deeper meaning. A higher purpose. Why do I believe these lies? Why do I go to work every day? I bought the lie and I pay it off with more lies.

It begins where it ends.

Maybe this doesn’t make sense to you. Where does a circle begin? Think about it. Everything goes in a loop. You are familiar with the concept of ‘going full circle’? I think I know. You think you know. I hike a lot of ‘loops’. Where do they end? Where they begin. And that isn’t even always true.

Now that you know that you don’t know me (or anything else), would you care to join me? You are here because you want what I want, after all. I can’t promise you the truth because I wouldn’t know it if it slapped me in the face. Let us, then, be entertained (if nothing else) by our false perceptions and our own individually skewed realities (if we can even call them that) while we occupy ourselves in the pursuit of the unknowable thing we call…the truth.