Alternate Universes: The Writer's Reality and Misunderstandings

An understanding can be seen as an arrival at a perspective where information is processed into a useful too.  Before you had the understanding, you were searching through the tool kit, either assessing implements or trying to find one specific device with which to engage a specific task.

From another perspective, you may encounter a thing which at first offers you no clues to help you discern its purpose.  After some examination, you may arrive at a vision or understanding of the function that thing is meant to perform.  

There is one such device that once resided in your tool drawer but has long since been moved to your cooking utensils drawer after an ah-ha moment you reached when you were trying to open a jar with an unmanageable top, your hands gripping, but not able to move the top so much as a scant millimeter.  

Your ah ha moment featured a vision of how the device now in your cooking utensils drawer could be used,  Your presumption became a fulfilled event.  You understood the function of the device and have used it with some regularity over the past several years.

You venture the understanding that all understanding is directed at one or more purposes.  You could, for instance, understand about a thing or concept that it has no meaning in your life or, indeed, that a thing or concept or condition is of no use to you.  

You'll have understood enough about the circumstances to understand the relationship between understanding and inertia.  Once an understanding is in place, it tends to stay in place until some greater need arrives, mandating a deeper, greater understanding.  The inertia could also lead you to understand how this particular understanding is obsolete, thus no longer of immediate value.

Some of the things appearing near the top of your priority triangle relate to a greater understanding of yourself, an ongoing examination of what aspects of your understanding are growing into obsolescence or, perhaps of equal negativity, aspects of your understanding that are wrong.

Difficult to say how long you've been on the trail of sifting error and misunderstanding from your intellectual and emotional hard drives.  Suffice the matter to say understanding is a filter through which you view reality.  Your reality as a person begins with you in context with the bubble in which you abide, extends to the way you see the universe in which your bubble is located, then periscopes for otherwise impossible views of reality through books, photographs, and information dumps.

Your understanding of reality is the equivalent of you ranging through the sock drawer to find a matching pair or the tool drawer to find an appropriate tool.  You could, as is your wont, chose not to wear socks.  In fact, you cant recall the last time you wore socks.  Was it that time in late July when you wore sweat socks to prevent a blister from your walking shoes?

You're not entirely sure why the accuracy and integrity of your view of reality matters as much as it does.  The excuse that an accurate sense of reality is of primary importance to a writer holds little weight; you know any number of successful writers whose sense of reality is best described as idiosyncratic.  So, for that matter, is yours.  

You don't get many frequent flier miles for knowing the sun revolves about earth rather than the reverse, but even thinking through the implications of believing the earth orbits around the sun, you arrive at an understanding of how understanding works.  You would be likely to make other misconceptions, to be guilty of even more misunderstandings than you are already guilty of owning.

A primary reason for your own, idiosyncratic priority triangle is the number of flaws you find in the written and spoken words of others.  You do not set forth each day to write to contest the understandings of others as much as to define and share your own.  This approach is based on your understanding that you are more likely to have your own beliefs changed or honed by listening to others than the others are from reading or listening to you.

In the time you have left in your present format, thoughts of fame and fortune set aside, your notion of the good writing life is the understanding that you have written more understandings than you have written misunderstandings.  Yes, you know story is filled with confrontation and disagreement; you don't mean those kinds of misunderstanding.  Rather you mean that the world as you see it is based more on things that are probably right as opposed to things probably wrong or probably questionable.