Notice This: Perception Is One-Tenth of the Law Now
Updated: Oct 4
Notice this. Did you know that what you see is not always what is true? I think that matters more now than it ever has. We are living in a time of visual everything—pictures, videos, headlines, social media, advertising, AI, filters, clips and endless information moving in front of our eyes. We see so much that sometimes we forget seeing something and knowing something are two completely different things.
Early mornings are probably my favourite time to think about stuff like this. There's something about the beginning of the day before everything starts moving. My energy feels clearer. The air feels fresh. The light is just starting to hit the sky and, for a little while, I feel like I'm part of that freshness. Before the messages, the scrolling, the news, the opinions and everything else comes rushing in, I have a chance to hear my own thoughts. I've realized how important that has become for me. I want to set my mind on what I want before I step into a world that's constantly showing me what it thinks I should want. I want to command my own vision before the world starts trying to command it for me. Not because everything out there is bad, but because there's a lot out there, and if I don't know where my own mind is standing, it's pretty easy to start following whatever happens to be standing in front of me.
I like replaying life in my mind. I look back at conversations, things I've seen, decisions I've made and moments that didn't make sense when they first happened. Sometimes when you replay something without the emotion of the moment attached to it, you see something completely different. You notice a detail you missed. You realize something you believed wasn't exactly what happened. You recognize where your own perception filled in pieces that weren't actually there. That's why I think we need to teach our eyes how to see again. Not just look. See. Because there are so many layers between what appears in front of us and what is actually true. If we don't understand that, we can end up following an image, an idea, a person or even a version of ourselves that was never completely real in the first place.
One morning a thought came through my mind: perception is one-tenth of the law now. I know the old saying is possession is nine-tenths of the law, but I'm talking about something completely different. I'm talking about how little weight I think we should give our first impression of something now. What you see can be part of the truth without being the whole truth. That's a difficult adjustment because human beings naturally trust our senses. We see something and our brain immediately begins creating meaning around it. We see an image and create a story. We see someone's life and create assumptions. We see somebody's success and decide they're doing better than us. We see someone's relationship and decide they're happier. We see a face and decide how that person must feel. But how much do we actually know?
I grew up in the days of Polaroids. You took a picture and waited for it to develop. Or you took your film somewhere like Black's Photography and waited for your pictures to come back. When you finally got them, there they were. You couldn't instantly alter everything you didn't like. What you saw was generally what had been standing in front of the camera. Today, an image can be edited, filtered, generated, rearranged, cropped or removed from its original context before we ever see it. Video isn't automatically proof anymore either. Words can be taken from one situation and placed into another. A few seconds can represent something very differently from the full conversation. That doesn't mean everything is false. It means our thinking has to become stronger.
I don't want to live suspicious of everything I see. That's not freedom either. I want to be able to enjoy something beautiful without immediately interrogating it. I want to laugh at something funny, admire someone's creativity and experience the incredible things technology allows us to see. But I've learned to leave a little space between "I saw it" and "I believe it." That space is important because sometimes what we see isn't necessarily trying to deceive us. Sometimes our own mind does the rest. We see what we want to see. We fill in missing information. We create the ending before we've read the entire story.
That's why perception can be tricky. Something catches our attention and immediately creates an emotion—curiosity, fear, envy, excitement, anger or desire. Before we've even had time to think about what we're looking at, we're already feeling something about it. And where the mind goes, the body often follows. That's why I've started treating thinking like something I actually need to practice. I know that sounds strange. Thinking is supposed to be something we naturally do, but there's a difference between having thoughts and deliberately examining them.
I like people watching for that reason. I'm fascinated by how people think. I'm not interested in judging somebody because I don't know where they've come from or what they've experienced. I just find the human thought process interesting. Two people can see exactly the same thing and walk away with completely different understandings of what happened. Social media has made that even more obvious. We're communicating through pieces now—a picture, a sentence, a comment, a fifteen-second clip, a reaction. We're often trying to understand entire human beings through fragments of information. That's a lot to ask of perception.
So I've become more comfortable asking questions. What am I actually looking at? What do I really know? What part of this am I assuming? Is this something I genuinely believe, or have I simply seen it enough times that it started feeling true? Those questions don't make you cynical. They make you curious. And curiosity might be one of the most important things we can protect right now.
There's another side to this that I think matters just as much. We can't allow everything we see to become something we believe we need to become. It's easy to look outward and start building yourself from other people's images—their body, their home, their relationship, their success, their lifestyle, their idea of happiness. But maybe the person you're supposed to become isn't somewhere on your screen. Maybe they're already inside you.
I keep thinking about a dandelion looking at a rose. Imagine if that dandelion spent its entire life trying to become the rose. It could study the rose, admire the rose and compare itself to the rose every day, but it will never be the rose. And it doesn't need to be. The rose doesn't need to explain that to the dandelion either. It's simply busy being a rose. Maybe we need to do more of that. There are things we can learn from other people. There are things we can admire. There are people who can inspire us to grow, change and see possibilities we didn't know existed. But inspiration shouldn't require abandoning yourself. Become the best version of who you are.
That's why I'm becoming more protective of those quiet moments in the morning. Before everybody else's thoughts arrive, I want a few minutes with mine. Before the world shows me who I should become, I want to remember who I already am. Enjoy what you see. Learn from it. Question it. Appreciate it. But don't automatically make the view your truth. Perception is one-tenth of the law now. Give the other nine-tenths to thinking, curiosity, experience and your own damn inner voice. Ask questions. Create the world you want instead of waiting for somebody else to show you what it should look like. Don't become what you think you're seeing on a screen when the person you really need to become may already be sitting quietly inside you waiting to be noticed.
Relax. Release. Let go. Trust your own vision of yourself. You are enough. And if you want to become extraordinary, continue soaking up love, lessons and life—but make sure the life you're creating still looks like you.
— QueenB.Divine
The cure is conversation. Self-love and self-care will get you there.
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