What Else is Possible? How Our Perception Limits Our Potential

Every person has a different perception of reality. That is to say, we all see the world differently. Each of our individual realities is shaped and influenced by our life experiences (especially our childhoods), the people we interact with, the places we live in, the information we consume, and the stories we're told.No individual reality is better or worse than the others, as each is uniquely suited to the person to whom it belongs. The one major downside of our individual perceptions is that they limit what we believe is possible. If I haven't seen, heard about, or experienced something, then it effectively doesn't exist to me, even though it may be very real to many other people. So long as I am unaware of said thing, my perception is limited. And there are so many people, places, things, and experiences in the world that no singular human could ever know about all of them within a lifetime. In other words, our perception will always be limited to some extent.

 

However, we do have some degree of control over the limitedness of our perception. Just like anything else in the world, our perception of reality is capable of changing, and we can deliberately expand it by exposing ourselves to new and unfamiliar experiences. Unfortunately, our natural fear of the unknown often restricts us from experiencing as many new things as we could, and overcoming that fear takes a lot of perseverance and courage. I've found that many of my most perception-widening events in life have occurred when I didn't plan for them, when there was no opportunity to cancel, turn back, or opt out. The rest of this article is a real-life story of one such instance when this happened to me.

 

I recently had a personal experience that changed my perception of my physical abilities. My dad and I are both avid cyclists, and we were planning to take a ride from a city just outside of our hometown to a small village in the foothills of the nearby mountain range. My dad had ridden our planned route only once before, and believed it to be approximately 7 miles long. Since he'd been there before, we thought there was no need to consult a map for navigation or distance information. We knew we would be able to get food from one of my favorite resturaunts in the village before riding back to our starting point, so we didn't bring any nutrition of our own (besides water). I had ridden longer distances many times before, so I wasn't worried about exhaustion or hunger, and I knew my water bottles had enough capacity to sustain me. This ride, as we had planned it, would've been well within my comfort zone.

 

To our surprise, the route turned out to be 16 miles long, more than double our estimated distance! I didn't notice this until we began to pass mileposts with numbers higher than the 7 miles we were expecting to cover. But by the time I realized just how far there was to go, we were already nearly halfway there and I didn't want to stop. To turn back would've meant forfeiting dinner at a great resturaunt, which was one of the main goals of this ride. As much as would like to think I understand the value of persistence and resolve, what really kept me going was the promise of good food (yes, I'm just as human as the rest of you). Despite the distance, I managed to ride the whole length of the 16-mile bike path without feeling tired, although I did deplete almost my entire water supply. When we'd started, I never thought I could get this far, but in the end, the journey was not as exhausting as I would've expected had I known the true distance. We reached the village in about two hours, only to find that the resturaunt we wanted to get food from had closed earlier than usual because it was Sunday. Fortunately, there was another one nearby that was still open, so we ordered our meals for take-out and ate them at a local park. I refilled my bottle with water from the resturaunt (dad wore a backpack with a high-capacity drinking bladder, so he didn't need to replenish it), and we set off down the bike path again, back towards where we started our ride.

 

The return journey was significantly easier, as it was almost entirely downhill. We made it back to the city in nearly half the time it took us on the way out, and returned home moderately tired but triumphant. Reflecting on my unprecedented accomplishment, I observed how the day's circumstances had led me to exceed the perceived limits of my ability to ride a bike over long distance. Before that day, I believed I could cycle 17 miles in a day (on flat ground) and that was it. Now I know I can go up to 32 without completely exhausting myself. Additionally, this perception-widening experience has proven to me that my perception of reality really is limiting, but I always have the power to reach beyond it and do bigger and better things than I ever thought I could. While we might not all have The Little Engine That Could's level of belief in ourselves (I know I certainly don't), we can always remember to ask ourselves: what else is possible? If you can think of it, you can almost certainly make it become real, despite your current perception dictating that it's 'impossible'.