Over the past year I’ve come to an improved understanding of what it’s all really about. Not to say my way is better than any other, just one of several billion imperfect perceptions of life. All tuned to a different channel from the very beginning, we grow up and take it all in as it comes at us. Without realizing it, we form our own unique understandings of culture and society based on what is exposed to us day and and day out. Often with this, we don’t give ourselves the chance to take a step back and look at who we actually are and what how we see the world. Instead we often take it all as it is even though it isn’t any which way to begin with. Each individual is tuned to their own channel which presents their view of reality. As people spend sufficient time with another and share their experience, there is a give and take that ever so slightly tunes their channels to be more to comparable frequencies. Being the channels that we are, it’s challenging to look from the outside and see what exactly is making you what you are. As such, we don’t notice the opportunities that arise in order to shift gears in timely moments.

Speaking of time, we are conditioned in such a way of being far too concerned about the future; events that haven’t happened yet. Within this, we’re displaced from our slivers of individual presence. A presence that all are granted with from the dawns of every equal existence. We become concerned with what society tells us we’re supposed to do, rather than the intrinsic gut feeling of what our experience is bringing us to do. Many being afraid to live life because what “would society think of me for pursuing this different path where in my conditioned minds view, society deems to be unacceptable. Our mind creates a story about us based on what we’ve seen, what we’ve done, and what’s happened to us. To separate oneself from that made up story is the beginning of certain freedom.

There have been countless times where I believed there is a set way of life, where these underlying steps need to be followed. For example, upon leaving high school, I thought I was destined to work in a high rise office building in a city. This is what I saw in movies and that’s how What I perceived to be success. Yet, I also had this conflicting notion where I would never be well off in life considering that’s how I grew up as an impressionable child with parents and a family that was not well off. Point being, it can be extremely difficult to escape certain world views; as we grow into them for the first quarter century of life they become engrained into us. We come to believe they are us.

So this past year I’ve been grateful for the opportunity to slow down, look inward, learn, unlearn, reconvene, etc. By no means has it being the greatest year of my life, but it has been different for better for for worse. To wrap this up, I’m better off knowing the highs only go so high and lows only so low. These moments of success and failure, love and hate, light and dark are a constant eternal flow. And for me, creating art is just that; an ongoing practice in creation. A creative output inherently based on an inner experience where I can feel progress being made. Knowing there is no grand finale atop this mountain is solace. There are always more mountains to climb with each their own obstacles to overcome.

Within a society of others telling you they way it is, cut the cord and formulate a more open reality. A reality viewed from all angles where each individual path is acknowledged, for we all are a product of our circumstances.

Life is a continuous path of progression and opening of one’s mind. All furthering ourselves with the importance in knowing there will always be further to go without any set destination. In knowing each individual is incomparable yet equally important from all points on the globe. The grandest understanding is that perceptions are collectively infinite. Each individual is part of the entirety and all stories matter, for all are uniquely intertwined in this vast spectrum we call society.