I’m sitting in the kitchen getting ready to stuff my face with some sort of unhealthy bread. It’s a typical afternoon, and like pretty much every night for the last 6 decades, my grandmother walks in to have what we latinos call “the cafecito” the little coffee.

A typical evening, nothing has happened, I’m not particularly worried about anything per say, and my grandmother, in her mid eighties is doing pretty good as far as I know. She’s retired, has enough money to live out the rest of her life, and certainly whatever fight she had to endure in her youth, is long gone at this point.

One bite into my slice of bread and I hear crying sounds. Something is off. I look at my grandma to see if she’s ok, or if maybe the phone has been turned on with some random video that has someone crying but no, it’s her, she’s crying.

Grandma, are you ok?

She replies, in a soft broken voice.

If your grandpa was still alive… I can’t believe how low we’ve fallen….

Silence takes over the room completely.

My ineptitude to handle the most unusual situation on a random evening over cafecito is in full display at this point, and all I can do is tell grandma.

What? You are doing great! What are you talking about?

Not the most tactful thing to say, I have to admit, but it was sincere.

She gets up, upset at the lack of agreement from her obviously confused grandson, and goes back into her room to finish watching a recycled novela of some sort.

I finish my tasteless toast, drink the most bitter of coffees and decide to call my brothers in confusion. I need to know if I’m an asshole, or if maybe there’s something going on I’m not privy of.

Perception and Truth

Can’t truly remember when it was the first time somebody said to me that perception is truth, but I remember fighting the idea. Not only verbalizing that of course, I disagreed, which seemed obvious at the time, but also because as much as I felt it to be incorrect, I did understand why it was “a saying” to repeat as some sort of deep wisdom.

As much as truth is factual and truthfully, unironically so; can be tested with various means, in the end of the day people don’t really work with truth. People mostly work with a story, a narrative they’ve weaved over the time they’ve been alive.

The very idea that perception is truth is the simpler digestible notion that people operate with the narratives and not so much with something they’ve been able to test for accuracy. Almost to the point where how accurate it is, or it’s not, is irrelevant.

Why do I say this? I hear you asking with my faux mental powers of precognition. Because, when presented with facts, with hard facts, with the other side of the coin, if you will, all of us, almost with no exception, close our eyes and shut down our ear canals.

I know now that my grandmother was not lying to me. I know she was not telling me a sob story to manipulate me into feeling some sort of guilt that somehow I needed for my own sake, using some sort of twisted logic to justify such action.

She meant it, she truly believed, and probably does so to this day, that her life today is not secured. That the little stability that I perceive her to have, her savings, the home my grandpa left for her, the family she has around, is, for a reason or another, not enough to allow her to sleep well at night.

And this is where I draw the conclusive conclusion, with all the redundancy that round objects tend to have, because deepities can be cool and also stupid.

Change your perception, change your life

This is my plan today, these days at least. I mean, I don’t know exactly where I’m going but the good news is that I’m not alone, all of us have no clue, and yes, you don’t either my dear reader and I suspect this is why these words have piqued your interest a bit.

Last week, I’m sure, again with my pseudo-mental powers in full display, you were probably finding yourself a little lost. Asking the most self judgmental side of you, the one that likes to talk a lot right before you sleep, if you were happy.

Sometimes the questions has different shapes, sometimes it sounds a little less cliche but it’s the same question nonetheless.

Is life shit?

Is a recurring theme in my head, and I can somehow turn it into a movie without much effort.

But again my friend, this is the trick and thus, the plan I’m attempting to have.

Because if there’s one thing I know, is that no matter who I’ve met in life, rich, poor, young, old, blue collar or white collar for that matter. There were also split into two categories. Those who felt gratitude for the things they had, and those who felt frustrated for what they lacked.

So the plan is this, to sum it up and to not fluff you until next Tuesday.

There's always shit to be grateful for... and if there's not enough, the battle, the goal is to find more of that shit.

Yeah, very poetic, I admit, but also very true.

MenO