“A young girl sits in a classroom, staring out at the river. The river gleams, twists, coursing past the boxed-in schools, the boxed-in minds. Trapped in her classroom, she sits, and stares, and pours all her isolation, all her resentment, into the river below her. Years later, the girl is Hayley Talbot, mother of two, and she is ready to meet the river again…”

[Lucy Stone for Travel Play Live Magazine, see the full article here]

I’m so passionate about challenging perceptions, especially in young minds (that tend to create their realities and accept them as gospel). We construct our truths with habits, values, and beliefs and one way or another, if we couple this with the auto-programming of society, we find ourselves trapped by our convictions. I was SO strong minded as a young teenager. Nothing could have crow-barred me out of the mental chains I shackled myself in, out of sheer will and contrarianism. But I’ve always loved a challenge. And if someone had have challenged my perceptions by causing me to see and think of things a different way, by doing something a little differently, by going at the same set of circumstances from a different angle, I’m sure it would have caused me to reassess my own views and my own comprehension of my capabilities. I hope that it would have caused me to try new things. To question. To seek my purpose. And to gain the confidence from accomplishing the things I set my mind to. To grow beyond those things and to try new ones. Bigger ones. This is what drives me now. Because on this river that I hated as a teenager, this stretch of water that I found so undulatingly boring, I had the adventure of a lifetime. And it was under my nose all along. This same body of water that remained manifestly unchanged taught me that perception is everything.

If you change the lens, you change your life.