Don't believe everything you think

Within a few minutes after your body has started to settle and your teeth stopped chattering, you start doing laps around that pond of words that conquers your mind again. Back and forth, front stroke, backstroke, diving, floating, until your muscles began to give out. Your lungs were not taking in enough air for them to allow you to keep on moving. Your hearts starts to pump; slowly, then faster, then slowly again. You can almost sense, smell, and feel the crescendo between your ribs pounding. More pounding. Another stroke, another dive until you give up. By this point, your heart had had enough already. So you flung your arms back raise your legs and laid there, right there and then, looking up the night sky, hoping it will not fall over your head.

At first, you could not hear a thing. Bump and bump again. Only bumps. It is so loud and clear that you can hear it everywhere around you. Then again your eardrums soaking in murk could not have helped your newfound perception. You close your eyes and try to figure out what the stars sound like. You succumbed into the trail some more hearing where the noise subsides. Lub, Bump, lump, dub. You look up again and finally open your eyes to the things surrounding you and you heard it. You heard it all. The whole thing. Everything.

You heard the wind. You heard the crickets. You heard the blood pumping through your veins and body. You heard your muscles contract again under the weight of oxygen going through your pipes, inside deep your lungs, down all the major arteries, flowing. You begin to imagine blood cells swimming, floating over the surface. And then oxygen swimming along with crickets fireflies and leaves. All conspiring to help you take a breath again. The world was swimming too before you know it. You begin to wonder why.

That is when you realize it.

You realize this one thing that does not matter; the how, the when, and the why. Something either accepted or overlooked or never examined for what it was.

We are damaged. Not we necessarily, but our thoughts. They are damaged. They are the things that cause misery and demand a share of our breaths. They are the things that keep us a long distance away from what really is the issue. What is really happening? However, we do it. We are the perpetrators that have brought along this obscurity in our own vision. We foster as real anything that we convince ourselves to believe, one way or another. Even our heart beating has ended up being a disturbing, humming noise that gets crowded among thoughts that have to be discarded eventually.

It is a means of survival after all. A choice to be made; listen to either the heart or the thought. You want to leave it better than it left you.

They say that once you understand you can change everything, even if you can’t just yet see things clearly, hear them clearly. You can’t help but weep a bit for it. You cannot help but feel. That is the only way to validate perception.