Fighting Fevers, Winning Medals and Getting Choked to Sleep. (Part One)

How the right framing allows us to be comfortable in environments that might otherwise be torture.

Perception is reality

In Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant said, “We can only know things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves.”

The world our eyes delivers to us is one filtered through light and shadow. A colourblind man sees a different reality to a girl with 20/20 vision or a hawk or a ladybug. The experiences we have and the things we witness are framed by the life we’ve led up to that point. These things inform how we digest the objective world out there.

In short: we don’t get access to direct reality. We only get access to perception. But perception is all we’ve got, so perception is reality.

Fantastic. We’ve gone full circle and are back where we started.

Was there any point in old Immanuel raising this idea in the first place?

If the chocolate bar I’m eating looks a different shade of brown to me than the one you see, so long as it doesn’t change how delicious it is, what’s it to me?

Why even bring it up?

Furthermore, what’s a dead German philosopher got to do with the strangulation, fever dreams and prizes I hinted at in the title?

I’m getting there, but indulge me.

I’ve come up with a theory I want to fold it into the above idea and how it relates to writing and the life that informs that writing.

Perhaps this is me seeing the world through the lens of writing because writing the main thing I think about. But I’m increasingly starting to believe that all writing is is an attempt to express this idea that “perception is reality” or at least demonstrate it in different ways.

Your use of style, the way your sentences pop, the perspective you’re coming at a topic from, are all just expressions of the novel way you interface with the world translated in word form.

There are the events occurring out there in objective reality and there is the gaze, the framing, the reaction through which the event is filtered.

Without getting too woo woo, consciousness is less of a stable condition than many would like to think it is. Just take the transition from when you first get shaken awake by your alarm clock into your work day vs the way your mind is interacting with reality when you’re leading a corporate presentation vs a few hours later when you’re cutting loose over a few drinks. These are all instances of the same mind, but the consciousness is vastly varied. The voice required to do justice to each state is one that must be tailored to each new setting.

So when Immanuel Kant makes the statement, “We can only know things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves,” It’s hard to argue.

Increasingly I see my role as a writer as an obligation to pay attention to these states and develop my use of language in a manner that best captures the essence of them. If I were a movie maker, my analogue for this would be the choice of the music score, the lighting, the pacing of scenes, the heaviness of the story telling hand.

Each choice dictating how you capture the particularities of life itself beyond the objective. Because as I’ve demonstrated, we don’t get to see the objective. Perception is all we’ve got.

In the last six weeks, I’ve experienced a dramatic stretching and compressing of my conceptions via experiences and states. It’s difficult to parse whether this is down to me simply paying closer attention to my perceptions in light of all the above or whether this is indeed the organic expression of objective reality as it’s always been, but it’s given me some fantastic concrete examples of the abstract ideas I’m trying to articulate here. So let’s dive in.

Well first…some backstory for those who don’t know:

In two weeks I’m leaving London, the city I’ve been living in for the last three years. I also train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Since I may not get another chance for a while, I decided to compete one last time before I leave the country. This goal proved to offer very combustible matter for this experiment in observation I’ve described above.

Training:

In the first three weeks after deciding I wanted to compete training was going well. As I got into better shape, squared off the lifestyle ends that had got a bit loose while travelling and holidaying, I noticed a clarity of thought an improvement of general mood and outlook on life, relationships, goals. There’s something to the tension of preparing for one on one competition that shifts the mind to a different place. Interestingly I observed this actually triggered a less creative state of mind however, so it wasn’t great for my writing output.

I suppose my internal resources were more concerned with cutting away inefficiencies and honing integrated technique rather than innovating. Which makes sense. Going into battle (so to speak) with limited time, you want to sharpen your proven, most reliable attributes and techniques for the sake of survival rather than be inventive for the sake of future prosperity. It makes sense that there would be a narrowing of focus that’s less concerned with introducing new ideas—an essential element of writing and storytelling.

So that was interesting to observe. A clearer mind due to basic fitness, but a slightly less creative one due to the pressures of impending competition.

Getting Strangled:

I got choked unconscious in one of those training sessions—for the layman I should clarify, this was a bit of an anomaly. This was only the third time this has happened to me in eight years doing the sport. Nonetheless it was another fork in the “perception is reality” highway.

My training partner had a collar choke, I could feel he had it locked in fairly tight, but I was in a dominant position. As he held the grip, the black edges of my vision closed in around an oval tunnel. But I’ve been there many times before and was confident that if I could get my body past his legs I’d be able to relieve the pressure on the choke and he’d lose the leverage to finish the move. On a fast decreasing supply of blood to my brain I ran the calculation that I could get to that dominant position before that tunnel closed in. Unfortunately that tunnel doesn’t work in a linear manner. The race I thought I was in wasn’t playing by the same rules as me. The edges don’t need to close all the way to black for you to pass out.

I woke up to a handful my training partners standing around my limp body. Their expressions a mixture of concern and grinning. First of all it’s very strange to wake up in public in the middle of the day. When you get choked unconscious it feels like you’ve had a full night’s sleep. Even if you’re only out for a few seconds or less, you have full length dreams and actually feel quite rested afterwards. You also get disconnected from your own identity.

So I woke up. Saw everyone standing around who at that point where strangers to me. I was a stranger to myself. As my memory caught up and context fell into place I started saying, “sorry.” Which was irrational. As was the immediately embarrassment that came next. Then my identity returned, the events leading up to the choke came back to me and my next words were, “shit, you got me.” I finished and actually won the rest of the round then went about my day.

In most other contexts such an event has the potential to be heavily traumatic. The wrong people, the wrong setting and that’s a near death experience which might effect how you walk through the world for the rest of your life. But framed beneath the label of sport, informed by my knowledge of where the actual danger lines lie, it was just another embarrassing yet slightly humorous experience that I’m able to share with you today. The cause and effect of how I ended up there was no mystery to me whatsoever. Without taking credit away from my training partner, it was my tactical misread that put me there. I was training with a partner who I respect and trust, but simply let myself get a little too close to the edge.

The Flu

A week and a half later got the flu. A bad flu.¹ One that kept me in bed for three days. The type of flu where even if I was in a state to wrangle the NHS’ convoluted process to arrange a doctor’s appointment, I would have been doing well to drag myself along to the clinic. This led into a two week period where I could feel next to no joy. All those biological resources instead being funnelled towards the goal of getting healthy again. But with a good deal of rest, night nurse, chicken soup and every other flu remedy, those windows of self began to open up again.

I could think. I recognised the texture of my own mind that had been muted for literal weeks. Day by day my ability to enjoy music, taste food and write came back to me in increasingly larger windows.

This article is running long…

Okay I’m about halfway through and I’m weary of how dinged up modern attention spans are so I’m going to cut this here and give you a part two next week. I hope the point I’m trying to make here is coming across though. How the mind that interacts with events and experiences is the primary factor in how those events and experiences are received.

Part two available here.

PS.

If you’d like to support my writing without committing to a full paid subscription, why not buy me a coffee. instead?

If there’s one altered state of consciousness that haunts me, it’s caffeine withdrawal. Few things hang over me like the spectre of uncapped adenosine receptors, leaking vats of that demonic drowsiness chemical into my brain well before the sun’s gone down and I’m prepared to lay my head on a pillow. I know it’s my fault that I’m here. My insistence on artificially stimulating myself every morning is the very reason I’ve got more of those receptors inside my skull than your average non addicted person. Each time I plug one with the perfectly shaped caffeine molecule, I force my body to react to the false signal and create another one. Which starts the vicious cycle of dependence and requires me to deliver more caffeine. More coffee to fill the new receptors just to get me to baseline. I know no one wants to be an enabler, but you’re dealing with an addict here. Of all the vices, caffeine is the closest thing to a healthy one. Yes that’s justification of the habit, but even if a day without the stuff turns my thoughts to mush, sends a serrated blade down the inside of my skull, it could be worse. My drug of choice could be meth, heroin or huffing glue. I could be calling you at all hours of the night asking for. “C’mon man, just this one time. I’m in a real bind. I just had to sell my shoes to a bus driver. I’ll pay you back. I promise.” Imagine that? This is much better. I’ve still got my shoes. I’m wearing them right now. So what do you say? Buy me a coffee?

1. I have a theory on why I got sick in this case which is linked to the writing process that I’ll discuss in a later article. But I won’t dig into this now.