My favorite movie of all time is Big Fish, while there are others that represent well who I was at one point of my life, or another, Big Fish is the one that demonstrates my view on reality and the way things are. When I refer to past events in this blog, it is not my desire to paint the picture exactly the way it happened, if you want to know the solid details without embellishment, the you will have to use your imagination.
There was an art movement around 1865 which focused not on how things would look if you sat and stared at it for hours, but a focus on the way light reflected on objects, and how things look if you only glance at it. This movement moved forward in more than just the work of Monet and several painters into the realm of music, shaking up the paradigm and creating a different way of looking at things. The writers at the time began to take note of this movement and writing took a dramatic change. The style of writing based on the impressionist movement was “characterized by the use of details and mental associations to evoke subjective and sensory impressions rather than the re-creation of objective reality.” The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
This is the style of writing I aspire to when I refer to events in the past, this is how I try to view my personal history, a blending of reality and emotion to show a picture more complete than a laundry list of activities as they occurred. I wrote a story a few days ago reminiscing about my time in the military and how I discovered that I was in control of how I reacted to things. The actual events are represented well, and using your imagination to remove the fine details will give you the events “as they literally were”… but what’s the fun in that?
This is more than just a style of writing, the whole point of this post is to suggest that this can be an outlook on life, that by giving events and emotion the ability to adjust to our emotions, our desires, and our feelings we control not only how we feel about the present, but how we, and others view the past.
It all comes back to the theory of a lucid reality, that we control the past, the present, and the future with our thoughts and actions.
Tell me events in your life that you feel might use an impressionist touch up.
Also, if you find this blog of any value, or anything here to be interesting, please take a moment to tell a friend.
Bibliography
What is Impressionism – Wise Geek
July 24th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Claudious
In my professional life as a personal coach I advocate for people to focus on how they want things to really be and what difference it makes to their way of being. It’s all about getting away from the detail, drama and problems and into a space of positive opportunity and reflection. It’s the often the detail and the drama that clouds the true reality.
July 24th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
I love this post and your writing. Reality is objective, emotions, desire and feelings personalize it.
July 25th, 2008 at 10:08 am
I too really love your post. I see the military was time in Hell. It’s a hard lesson to learn that you can choose how you feel and think.
But you have a gift in writing. Giving feel taste and imagery to the words.
The trick here for me is to choose an event in my past that doesn’t need an impressionist touch up. Idea…this could be a whole new approach to the ‘Life Sketch’
I like that idea.