So, What Do You Make Of It?

As a child of barely four years, I would often Alie on the grass and look up at the bright blue sky dappled with feather-like clouds.

- Ekam J. Singh

That exercise almost always presented a conflict for me. I would have a hard time deciding what a cloud formation represented. The same bunch of white fluffy substances would, at the same time, seem like a lion baring its teeth, a group of banyan trees, and even like several giant lollipops stacked next to each other! I would finally settle with the lollipops since the lion was a terrifying proposition and the banyan trees simply did not tickle my imagination enough. As the years passed, my ability to spot lollipops in the sky slowly diminished because the 'lollipops' were explained to me as “masses of condensed water vapour floating in the sky”. The former had made me happy as a child and the latter made me informed as a teenager. What is interesting is that the clouds or 'lollipops' didn't change but my PERCEPTION did. The sight that once made me salivate was now just a geographical fact; it had lost its magical appeal for me.

Indeed, that is how empowering or even disempowering perception can be. We can either view a situation with rose-tinted spectacles or pure black sunglasses. What we choose not only creates a picture but works its way into our subconscious, gradually moulding the way we function.