Reality is Personal

Reality is Personal

My little friend Jack is a world traveler — well, his parents travel and he tags along.  When he returned from a trip to South Africa, we asked him what Africa was like. Two and a half-year-old Jack answered, “Well, it’s a lot like a house.” 

Jack’s perspective might be a bit small. South Africa is many things. An adult traveler might mention safari parks, native peoples, and penguins on the beach, but to Jack, who lives in an apartment most of the year, Africa is a house. Perspective shapes our reality.

Journalist Brooke Gladstone, in The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on the Moral Panic of Our Time, writes that America is a place of shifting realities. Each person views the world through a “prism” which shapes their reality. That is, each person looks at the world, and the facts presented by science, society, or history, to create their own reality. Gladstone defines reality as “what forms after we filter, arrange and prioritize … facts and marinate them in our values and traditions.” For every person on earth, “Reality is personal.”

Reality slides, shifts, and tumbles from person to person, family to family, city to suburb, farm to factory. Every member of a single family will perceive reality from a different place. A parent views reality from a position of responsibility. A child sees reality from a position of play. Dad runs around turning off lights (thinking about the electric bill) while Tommy runs the TV, computer, microwave, and stereo at the same time. The eldest sibling sees the world differently from the youngest. “How does he get away with so much? Mom and Dad never let me do any of those things!”

If realities can be so different within one family, think about the variety of realities that exist in a classroom, a church, a city, a state, and a nation. Politicians and the media present us with “facts,” which each of us sifts through our beliefs, traditions, knowledge, and biases, sort into categories, and stamp as true or false. My reality, that which I perceive as true to my circumstances and convictions, may never match yours — in fact, it may never even get close.

Problems arise when we don’t acknowledge that these differing realities exist. We stand firm and say, “My way or the highway. My candidate is honest. Yours lies. My interests are important. Yours are trivial. Life is not fair for me but you get all the breaks.” Gladstone suggests that our inability to acknowledge the value of others’ realities prevents us from working together to make a better world.

Without an objective reality, our subjective realities divide us. Gladstone writes that “… we cannot see the real world, whatever that may be. We live in the world that we made from what we see and what we know, and also in the world, we didn’t make and do not see and do not know.” We struggle with differing realities that may never be reconciled. 

Gladstone ends her short book with hope. “We cannot fully enter someone else’s [reality]. But if we really look, we might actually see that other reality reflected in that person’s eyes…” When we listen to others and try to understand the reality in which they live, we come closer together. Instead of clashing, differing realities may sit down, have a meaningful conversation, and work toward mutual understanding. 

Jack’s house may not be all that Africa is, but when we try to understand the realities of another, we can sit down on the porch and enjoy the view together.