A Prism Reality

I was thinking about an ex earlier.

Not in a nostalgic way, before anybody gets excited.

I was wondering whether, if I met that exact same person for the first time today, I would fall as deeply for him as I did then.

The probability seems fairly low because I'm not the same person who met him then. My reality has altered. The things I know have changed. My understanding of myself has changed. What I want has changed. What I notice has changed. What attracts me, what repels me, what I'll accept, what I'll question and what I won't even entertain anymore have all shifted.

He could theoretically be exactly the same person and I could experience him completely differently.

And that's where my brain wandered off into prisms.

Not because the idea that our choices change our trajectory is particularly new to me. I've been fascinated by that for years. The butterfly effect is exactly the kind of thing that can occupy my brain for hours. One tiny movement here somehow becoming an enormous change somewhere further down the line? Obviously I'm going to stare into that particular abyss.

The power of now fits into this too. I've understood for a long time that the only point from which anything can actually happen is here. Now. The past has already happened and the future doesn't yet exist as an experience. Whatever comes next has to emerge from this moment.

None of that was new.

The prism was.

Or perhaps even that isn't quite right.

Maybe the prism was simply a different angle from which I suddenly saw all of those things at once.

Which, rather conveniently, is exactly the point.

Because what if this is a prism reality simply because we are the prisms?

Think about light travelling through glass. Change the angle and you change what happens to the light. One beam enters and suddenly there are different colours, different directions, different possibilities emerging from what appeared to be one thing.

What if we're doing that constantly?

Every thought changes the angle. Every emotion changes it. Every experience, belief, decision, piece of information, moment of healing, fear, curiosity, conversation and realisation alters the glass by some tiny degree.

Something happens and it passes through me.

Except there is no permanent, fixed version of me for it to pass through.

There's only me now.

And now.

And now.

Each one fractionally different from the last.

Which means even singularly, before I bring another human being into this at all, I'm already living in a prism reality.

The woman who met that man years ago stood at one particular point and an entire reality extended out from it. She experienced him through everything she was at that moment. She made choices from there. Those choices created experiences. Those experiences changed her. The changed version made the next choice.

Until eventually all those tiny angles led here.

To me, sitting somewhere completely different, wondering whether I'd even fancy him now.

I already know that changing one decision can alter everything that follows it. That's the butterfly effect. Pull one thread from the past and there's absolutely no guarantee the tapestry still looks anything like the life I'm standing in now.

But what suddenly fascinated me was the geometry of it.

Because if now is the only point from which anything can be created, then now isn't simply a moment on a line.

It's a point of refraction.

I started picturing it literally as a dot.

Now.

And lines travelling out from it in every possible direction.

I could message somebody after writing this. I could decide not to. I could go somewhere tomorrow and meet somebody I wouldn't have met if I'd stayed home. I could read one sentence that changes how I understand something I've believed for twenty years. I could have a conversation that changes somebody else's direction too.

None of this is revolutionary to me individually.

Put it through the prism, though, and suddenly all these ideas I've carried for years start throwing colours onto the same wall.

The butterfly effect.

The power of now.

Perspective.

Consciousness.

Choice.

Healing.

Human connection.

They're all describing, from different angles, how much can radiate from a single point.

One tiny change in angle doesn't necessarily look particularly dramatic when you're standing beside the prism. Follow the line far enough, though, and it ends up somewhere completely different.

And every one of those points creates more points.

More angles. More lines. More possibility.

We tend to draw time something like this:

Past → Now → Future.

One line. One direction.

I've never particularly believed life is that simple, but the prism gives me a different way of seeing why.

Because from the point of now, there isn't one direction.

There are potentially infinite ones.

And I'm not even talking about parallel universes here. There may be another version of me living somewhere in the cosmos who made completely different choices and currently owns seventeen alpacas. I have absolutely no way of proving there isn't.

I'm talking about this reality.

This one already seems prismatic enough.

Because then I have to add everyone else.

You're a prism too.

The same event can pass through both of us and emerge differently because it hasn't travelled through the same glass.

That's why two people can be in the same relationship and tell completely different stories about it. Two siblings can grow up in the same house and describe completely different childhoods. Two people can hear exactly the same sentence and one barely notices while the other thinks about it for the next ten years.

The event may be shared.

The reality of experiencing it isn't.

And then our realities interact.

Your angle affects something you say to me. What you say changes something in me. That changes the angle from which I make my next decision. My decision affects somebody else. Their response changes something in them.

Billions of prisms, constantly refracting through one another.

Except that still only accounts for the reality I can consciously see.

And I don't believe that's all there is.

I've believed for a long time that energy exists around us whether we're consciously tuned into it or not. I don't think something has to be within the range of my ordinary senses for it to exist. Radio frequencies are moving around us without us hearing them. Tune a radio to the right frequency and suddenly there's music.

The music didn't begin when I tuned in.

I just became capable of receiving it.

That's close to how I understand dimensions too. Not necessarily as separate worlds stacked neatly somewhere above us, but as frequencies or layers of reality existing alongside this one that we aren't ordinarily tuned to perceive.

So suddenly my prism reality gets considerably bigger.

Because I've been thinking about what travels out from the point of now.

What about everything travelling into it?

Energy is everywhere.

People carry it. Places carry it. Experiences alter it. I believe planetary energy affects it. There are days when something feels different before I have any conscious explanation for why. Someone else might interpret that astrologically, energetically, psychologically or not at all, but whichever language we put around it, we're still experiencing whatever reaches us through our own individual prism.

And perhaps energies are prisms in their own right.

That thought is where this really starts making my brain fizz.

Because if everything is energetic, then what reaches me may already have passed through countless other energetic influences before I ever consciously experience it. People, places, planetary energy, environments, other dimensions, other consciousness. Things I can see and things I can't.

Perception isn't necessarily the boundary of existence.

I can't see a radio frequency moving through my kitchen either. I'd be fairly ridiculous to conclude there isn't one because my eyeballs haven't personally verified it.

So now my little dot of Now has become something much stranger.

It isn't simply:

Past → Now → Future.

And it isn't even just:

Now → infinite possible directions.

It's receiving as well as radiating.

Energy and information arriving from every direction, passing through the particular version of me that exists at this exact moment, being experienced according to the angle I'm currently standing at and then travelling outward again through whatever I think, say, choose or do next.

And the really fascinating part is that what passes through me changes me.

Which changes the prism.

Which changes what I perceive.

Which changes what I resonate with.

Which changes what I choose.

Which changes what I experience next.

And around we go.

It means I could theoretically be standing within the same energetic reality today that I stood within five years ago and experience completely different parts of it, simply because I'm no longer tuned in from the same place.

Things I wouldn't have noticed then might be glaringly obvious to me now. Things that once pulled me towards them might barely register. Something I couldn't understand then might suddenly make complete sense because everything I've experienced between there and here has altered the angle from which I'm receiving it.

Which brings me straight back to the man I was thinking about in the first place.

Would I have loved him if I'd met him now?

Probably not.

But would I be the version of myself who probably wouldn't choose him now if the version of me who did choose him hadn't existed first?

There's the prism again.

We look backwards from who we are now and judge choices made by somebody who didn't have the information we currently possess.

Of course I can see it differently from here.

I'm standing at a different angle.

The past didn't happen to the exact person I am now. It happened to the person I was then.

And every experience since has changed the angle of the glass.

That's why trying to work out what "would have happened" if we'd chosen differently is probably impossible. Change one angle and you're no longer following the same beam.

And perhaps this is why the power of now has always made so much sense to me.

Now isn't important because it's the only moment we're supposed to think about.

It's important because it's the only point from which anything can move.

Everything behind me has already shaped the prism.

Everything around me is meeting it.

Everything ahead is still possibility.

And here I am, right in the middle, receiving and refracting.

Possibility isn't necessarily waiting somewhere ahead of us like a destination we're supposed to find.

Maybe it radiates.

From here.

From this exact point.

And then again from the next.

And the next.

An infinite number of lines extending from an infinite number of moments, crossing through an infinite number of other prisms, while energies we consciously perceive and energies we don't are interacting with the whole thing at the same time.

Perhaps reality doesn't need to split into multiple universes to be multiple.

Perhaps it already is.

Layered. Energetic. Perceptual. Dimensional. Constantly moving.

And perhaps we're not merely observing it.

We're participating in its refraction.

Which means I didn't actually discover a new understanding today.

I moved slightly.

Something I've understood for years passed through me from a different angle and threw another colour onto the wall.

And somehow, the prism explained itself.