Do you see what I see?

Sometimes, growth becomes a period of complete introspection and self-analysis. In this period, when your priorities often lie in the process of simply figuring out how to place yourself in the world, it is easy to forget the realities that exist in the way that life occurs. It is easy to forget about things like the grey area between right and wrong that occasionally exist in real situations. It is easy to forget that some rules can be unfair to the people who were born with less and struggle a lot more. It is also easy to forget that the quality of relationships can gradually change simply because people never stay the same. However, there are instances when you do not forget these things, but simply do not know them.

For many young people, entering into the real world is not the time when they leave their parents’ home and move into their own. It is not the time when they leave school, or enter the world of work. Entering into the real world can be something as simple as having an experience where your actions and the resulting consequences are solely your own. It may be a situation where without any guiding voices or an assurance that everything will turn out well, you make a decision and are proud of what results. It is the moment that we realise that the things we have learned so far about the way that life works can be useless, or completely contradictory to what we see happening. As a result of this realisation, most people establish their own set of rules. They combine the things that childhood has taught them with what they learn through experience, and this in turn allows them to live in a meaningful way.

How can we learn about things as they truly exist and not as we would like to see them? Why can we never seem to be prepared enough for what reality has to offer? What ability do we have to change the world when we cannot even fully understand it for the first half of our lives?

Recently, I discovered that until around the age of 12, children view the world differently as compared to adults. This does not only apply in the metaphorical sense, but also refers to the fact that their brains process sensory input in a different manner than an adult’s brain. Children view individual pieces of sensory information separately, while adults have the ability to combine sensory input into a single and unified perception. For example, if an adult sees a loud, brightly coloured machine, then they can associate the sound coming from it with its visual appearance. On the other hand, a child would not be able to make this association. According to the researcher who was involved in this finding, this phenomenon occurs because the brains of young children are still learning about how different sensory inputs from the outside world relate to each other. Over time, they gain more and more information that helps them to combine sensory input. In a sense, even our body has its own time in which it enters the ‘real world’.

The reason why we cannot ever anticipate what the real world is going to be like is that as children, no matter how hard we try, we can never really see the whole picture. However, as we grow, we slowly gather enough information through experiences that enable us to make the right choices and to be a good person. Although it occurs, we never notice the point at which our brain starts processing sensory input differently. Similarly, we are growing every single minute of our lives. We just might not notice it. So, when a young person is about to have their first experience out in the real world, it may be helpful to remember that perhaps they may not be prepared to face everything that life will bring, but they are certainly skilled enough to find a way to do so.