Your Fears Are Not Your Reality and Your Self-worth Should Not Be Crowdsourced if You Want to Live a Full Life

Nature Has a Lot to Teach Us About Perception Vs. Reality

At 5 a.m. this morning I woke up to something roaring outside my window.

Pissed off lions? Jurassic Park? It was deafening and well, terrifying. I stayed put, wondering why I thought going to Costa Rica for a flash fiction writing workshop was a good idea. Turns out the monsters were only howler monkeys.

Howlers are small monkeys, with faces like mini-gorillas and massive Napoleonic complexes.

Not being a great sleeper, I woke up at 4 a.m. the following night. The sky was dark -- the moon just a sliver -- and when I looked up I saw more stars than I’d seen in years. I had forgotten how abundant they are in a sky unsullied by light pollution. It felt like standing under a canopy of blessings and it filled me with immense gratitude.

Nature always has a message for us, this time about perception and reality.

For one, the monsters roaring in our heads are bigger in imagination than in real life. When we face our fears with curiosity and love, we often find that the crisis is not as bad as feared. When we focus on what’s real and get all the facts, we can handle the monkeys in our lives.

For another, we can be blind to the light of our inner wisdom when we crowdsource advice. We hold within an abundance of gifts, we just need to believe that they’re there in order to behold. 

I went to Costa Rica to learn how to write -- instead I was reminded of how to live.

Photo credit: Mike's Birds from Riverside, CA, US, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons