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While You Were Blinking: The Curious Crusade of Perspective

Consider for a moment how much of your own life you actually remember. 

 Combine that with the total of moments you’ve blinked. 

If that represents the total of what we’ve missed directly in front of us, consider for a moment how much we’re missing behind the scenes or beyond the field of view. 

 Beyond this, consider how much of our lives is constructed on beliefs, virtues and even memories recreated for us by other people; even our own memories, which we were ostensibly there to enjoy, endure and only fail to remember. 

 And even of those memories which remain with us, only fragments or incomplete snapshots are retrievable. 

 As such, we have assumed a great deal when we’ve accepted those narratives at face value as truths or representations thereof, and we have likewise filled the gaps of unknowns with storyline after storyline of the contrived yet familiar sense of normal. 

 Such is the case as we pass by the stranger who’s been apprehended by police, he who’s been persecuted by the uniformed army, and he who’s been sentenced to life in prison. 

 Even with such basic stories as our own respective births, we take for granted that we had entered the world in the regular fashion, that the stories shared with us have been accurate. 

 After all, they are the product of our most beloved family and friends. 

 How could they have possibly misled us? 

 Of course, there are many occasions which might warrant a stretching of the truth, for the benefit of theater, charm or entertainment. 

 In still other cases, this may purely illustrate a mere oversight or a form of forgetfulness. For each of these cases, we can surely grant an exception. 

 However, on the count of more profound subjects, those which we visit less frequently and with less joviality, the unforeseen effects of avoiding the deeper truth and failing to test it are not without consequence. 

 Though those consequences may appear nuanced or relatively insignificant at the time, or as the perpetuators of falsehoods sense little threat in carrying them forward, in basing our lives so casually on such assumptions, we commonly run the risk of never realizing our own thoughts, never testing the axiomatic bedrock on which we’ve rested our conclusions, and thus never exposing their infrastructural weaknesses until the greater structure crumbles to painfully awaken us to that which had been there all along, if only we had conjured the courage to look, to test and to experience the uncomfortable jolt. 

 Only then might we have realized our power, the ubiquity of this lazy portrait, that justice is but a word, and that the individual is all there is.

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