Personal Reflection:
We’re conditioned to see the world through hand-me-down lenses. Parents, teachers, bosses, algorithms — they hand us their truths, and we swallow them without question. It’s easier that way. But easy vision is borrowed vision, and borrowed vision will always keep you half-blind.
Einstein’s words hit harder the longer you sit with them: most people will never risk seeing with their own eyes or feeling with their own hearts. Why? Because it’s safer to blend in, safer to parrot back what the crowd already believes. Safer, but hollow.
To see with your own eyes means you’re going to notice the cracks, the lies, the hypocrisy nobody else wants to name. To feel with your own heart means you’re going to bleed — joy, grief, rage, wonder — all of it, raw and unfiltered. And maybe that’s why so few choose it: it’s not clean, it’s not convenient, and it sure as hell won’t win you applause.
But conformity has its own cost: you end up living as a ghost in your own skin. Better to be cut open by your own truth than embalmed in someone else’s comfort.
Reflective Prompt:
When was the last time you trusted your own eyes and heart over the noise around you? What did it reveal about who you are becoming?
Memoirs of Madness 