What is now my reality??

A belated entry: A moment spent questioning EVERYTHING.. 2 weeks after I arrived in India.

This amazing country.
A game is being played. They are in their own world. Walking down the street. But to me: how real is this world? Is everyone playing the game? It’s all seemingly so absurd. It isn’t poor is it? No it’s not. I don’t know what I see or what I believe. Too many contrasts leading to my confusion.

A world in the West. A world in the East. A world like that? A world like this?
A road in India. A road in Ireland. A road in the East. A road in the West.
The traffic reflects the country. Does it reflect this life?
The traffic reflects the wealth. Does it reflect what is real?

They scoot along, it’s all pretend. But it happens in every country. Everyone thinks it’s all so real.
But replace the “o” of so with “u” and add an “r” and it so easily has become “surreal”. People here they feel it be real. The dinky cars and the overloaded buses.

It cannot be, it cannot be. How can this be real?

Is a life of the West, oh so beautiful and clean, the real life? According to who? Who is to answer the truth to this unanswerable question?
Who is to label what’s reality and what’s not? Nobody can. Only through their own perception can they answer this, which is so personal, so unique, so individual, so right. It’s therefore never wrong, what a person calls “real”. If it’s right in their eyes, then nobody can disagree. So why does one question their reality? Why does one question their surroundings? It’s only logic that says when being in their own world the other world will always be questionable.

Placing yourself in somebody else’s reality can feel surreal. And that’s why we start to question. On a more personal note, that why I question. But what if one has felt both realities? Does one then question the 2 realities? Or does one simply accept both worlds to be surreal and therefore magical?

What do I feel? I feel to be invincible. I feel to be on the outside looking in at the world. This is my reason for questioning my reality. I’m looking at myself. At the world. I place myself out in the traffic. I let it be. I don’t get scared, doubtful, fearful, nothing. I’m invincible. Just like all the others walking along. I’m not me. I’m outside. I’m the witness of the person walking down that street.

Strolling along and engaged in where I step. My eyes are looking around, taking in the magic. Yet I’m walking and threading carefully, not getting too distracted. With a sense of being an outsider. I look like I’m an outsider, by the colour of my skin. But look into my eyes and at my manner, is to see I’ve never been anywhere else or walked along any other path. Yet I’m secretly amazed and inspired:
-I pass by a woman balancing a basket of fruit on her head - no hands required.
-I pass by a rat that scurries along the same road as me.
-I pass by a smell of human waste that steals my appetite several times over.
-I pass by an overloaded bus that wants to run me off the road.

My thoughts are being interrupted. Is that horn beeping at me to be smart?
Is that horn beeping at me to move?

I need to catch this thought before it’s interruption due to the beeping horn: When exposed to something over and over, the body becomes unaffected to it, or even immune. That’s what I’ve become or am on the road to becoming. Just like everyone else. To see their lives so basic and the simplicity of just being. But how hard it must be to live. However to them it seems so easy. They unconsciously practise caution, all the times, for what their surroundings could bring upon their health. I wonder: is illness something uninteresting? I wonder: is it something that’s only experienced when forgetting to be cautious? I wonder: is it only experienced when being cautious is too much of an effort, as merely surviving can take up more of their time and energy? I wonder: is surviving enough, be it with or without an illness? I wonder: are they invincible and immune to what the spoilt people of the world are not?

I’m pulled back to their reality, which has now become mine. Their world that feels, sounds and looks like a game, an enactment, a scene from a movie. So it’s fake, is it not?

Hang on!! That beeping brought me back to the real world. So this really is my reality. Where I am and what I see, the sounds I hear and the smells that seep through my pours, are what my sensory impressions are telling me what I must be aware of. And that’s why my thoughts were interrupted by the beeping of the horn from the little rickshaw that looks and sounds like a toy car. To survive and to remain in-tune.

So, I’m back. Their world. My world. But I was in my own world, before the beeping interrupted my own reality.

They see me and ask: “your place?”. With that they mean to ask: “where are you from?”. They have no clue how different they would feel in a place like “mine”. I prefer not to answer. I do, but my “place” is labelling me to be of a certain substance. I’ve questioned the realities of both worlds. It’s not to be answered, which reality is real and which one is not. So: all is ONE to me. I’m apart of every world and I’m delighted to reach this thought.

How can I see it as one? Due to 2 realities: I experience the collision of 2 opposites. When I feel and experience them simultaneously, all there is to be felt is magic, wonder, inspiration and amazement. It all collides and this is all there is: Gratitude for my roots, gratitude for my growth, gratitude for where I am and gratitude for where I’m leading myself to be. I can feel the benefits from it all. It’s happening at the same time and there’s the collision. I feel appreciation to have the opportunity and capability of looking at the world with such awe, such beauty and for taking all it can give me and for using this to grow. How grateful I am for the existence of such extremes.

Is this bliss? I can see it to be so. This simplicity yet the richness of their culture. A different kind of bliss, that brings the previous described appreciation for absolutely everything to my surface. There’s no other way it can be described: bliss, on all levels of being.