[Via]

To keep my diary private I created  symbols for recording in my journal when I was in elementary school. At its success, I created another and taught it to my friends. We  passed notes in class in those symbols. We even tried to create a new language: we used a repeating word before and after every word, for example, to say “let’s hang out after school.” we would say something like “ishletish ishusis ishhangish ishoutish ishafterish ishschoolish.”

It is very likely that I got this idea from one of the books I was reading back then. When we talked, our peers only heard a lot of “ish”. If my brothers opened my journal in those days, they would not have understood what I had written, nor would anyone other than me.  Just like my teachers would not have understood the notes my friends and I shared in class. Perhaps the reality for my brothers, teachers, and class mates who did not understand my symbols would be abstract signs. Perhaps reality is that which seems to immediately add up, or that which is proven to be feasible.

In my education class I learned that at a certain age, infants believed things that fell out of sight no longer existed. This idea has come to represent reality to me. Hence what is realistic is that which we can perceive or are convinced to be an actuality or a possibility. Reality is the seemingly straight forward. But what is straight forward?

To see a table and dismiss it simply as a table ignores the imagination that brought it to life: what it is made of; what else it could be or inspire. It is to ignore the spiritual beauty of the table. To be realistic is, perhaps, to be dismissive of the unknown potential of a situation; to narrow down to the blacks and whites. Not minding at all the depths of gray.

It seems reality is just a stepping stone for imagination and it ought to be utilized to seek out what else is out there. To aid one’s removal of the boundaries of the impossible; to tease curiosity into not being satisfied by the assumption that what can be sensed is all that exits. I like to think that reality is not that which one limits oneself to, but a tool that one utilizes to draw out more of the imagined and unimagined.
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Jane