Everyday Musings > Shift

I love watching crime fiction, whodunits and law series. There’s something beautiful about crime solving - the methods, the characters, the deductions, the coming together of facts, the final reveal.

The more I see them, the more I feel there is yet another vital element in their success.

The hero/heroine is always the one who gets it.

While that sounds obvious, when one studies it as a genre, it is ironic. The writers are shifting reality all the time. In TV series such as The Suits and Shark, lawyers have all the answers, whereas in CSI, the lab solves it every time. In Body of Proof, the Medical Examiner is the most intelligent. In Poirot, the private detective is the cleverest. In Marple, it’s an old lady, who lives in a little village, who puts it all together while the police stand baffled. In Law and Order, it is the official representatives of the government who matter. Each of these series has one point of view, and that is always related to the hero/heroine.

It is, in that sense, linear. When seen on the whole, as a genre, there is no one reality we can go home with. So whatever character becomes the hero, the world shifts to his/her gaze. It’s an amusement park with a bunch of rides and the one you pick will take you on its particular path.

It made me think of life – and how we are constantly living in shifting realities.

If working in advertising, ads seem bigger than life, brands seem life changing, and it feels like everyone is or should be excited about the 350th potato chip brand to be launched soon. If in social service, then one sees people being marginalised everywhere, suffering wherever one looks and feels the world spends too much time and money on trivial things like potato chips.

Often we can see our reality shift when we change jobs, change industries, move to another country/city, join a new gang of friends. We orient ourselves accordingly, absorb a new language, realign our loyalties and possibly our thoughts and beliefs. Sometimes, we move out of one reality into another, and hate everything about it. It doesn't align to the reality we knew and we want it returned to us.

The idea of shifting realities takes away the concreteness of right and wrong, the certainty of true and false that we often use to measure our lives by. And brings with it another shift.

If this is true, then there is no reality, except the one we choose.