swishism

Illusions are funny things.  Like most people I used to think the greatest power of an illusion is its ability to mislead.  I was wrong.  I got a phone call today, in short it was an offer to pursue something that my gut tells me is illusory. Of course this doesn’t stop me wanting to believe the offer is a good one, (who doesn’t want offers to be good?) and therein lies the power of an illusion.  Cutter, Micheal Caines’ sagacious character in The Prestige, put it like this:

“Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.”

It’s almost as if illusions somehow manage to strike up unspoken agreement with us.
Q: “You want to be fooled, dont you?”
A:”Why yes, I’d like that… very much”

This is nothing new, there’s a story of Jesus healing a blind man. He spits in the guy’s eyes and asks him, “Do you see anything?” and the guy says, “I see men, but they look like trees, walking”.  Now, this is the miracle-working, flavour-of-the-month Jesus in front of him, I wonder if it crossed the blind guy’s mind to say, “Yeah I’m 20/20 over here, Jesus you the God-man!”. Clearly this man was unprepared to live with the temporary hype and permanent  illusion, and so he tells it like it is;  Jesus goes on to restore his sight completely.  In spite of his poverty of vision, he recognised that settling for mediocrity would suck–the same as it would for any of us.  He didn’t want to be fooled.  Do we?

swishism entry acrostic, don't settle, illusions, response, sabotage