Everyone perceives reality in a different light. Reality is a result of the upbringing and surroundings of an individual and, as a person matures, they are exposed to more ideas, thoughts, and events. The actions and events that a person is exposed to are communicated through language, which defines reality by allowing people to become receptive to different ideas. While language can expand ones reality, language also places limits on that reality. Society, geography and language simultaneously expand and limit an individual's reality.
From the moment a person enters the world, his or her reality is different from that of anyone else's. Everything that a person sees, hears, smells, touches or tastes will add to his or her wealth of knowledge. This collection is thrown into a mish-mashed pile of sayings, images and life experiences that is regurgitated when a person experiences the next object or thought.
Richard Rodriguez explains how much he has changed in his essay "The Achievement of Desire", included in the collection, Ways of Reading, "It will be harder to summarize what sort of life connects the boy to the man" (622).
The road to any position in life is long and filled with unique obstacles, all of which shape a person into a well-rounded individual. It is nearly impossible to come up with a short summary of all of the experiences that one encounters in life. Life experiences are different for each individual, making each individual's reality unique.
As I said at the beginning of this article, reality for any given individual, is a direct result of their upbringing and surroundings. In his essay "The Banking Concept of Education", which is included in Ways of Reading, Paulo Freire comments that "The world which brings consciousness into existence becomes the world of that consciousness" (356).
The environment that a person lives in dictates how the person looks at the rest of the world.
For instance, if a native of a small tribe in the middle of an African jungle were brought into our modern world, the two realities would be very different. A simple instruction of "The keys are on the table, take the car to the store and get a gallon of milk" could be preformed without much thought to the average person living in our society.
However, to the displaced African tribesman, the entire phrase would make no sense, starting with the word "keys". The tribesman's reality does not involve taking a car to the store to get milk, he has no concept of a car, or anything involved with the car, or even what constitutes a gallon of milk.
All experiences in an individual's life are felt and shared using language. As children grow up, they are given words to define objects and feelings. Over time, the children reuse the words they were given, to communicate their feelings, wants and desires. The more a child is exposed to, the more they can share.
The world or area of the world a person lives in affects how one looks at the rest of the world: People develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.
Next time, will look at the effects of surroundings and language on our interpretation of reality.
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