Heroes, Halos, Hallucinations

One day while taking a relaxing walk through the forest, I came across a tree with a circular stairway, and as I followed the stairway up the tree with my eyes I spied multiple treehouses in the upper branches. Unable to resist the allure of the treehouses, I climbed the stairway taking in each treehouse as I went along, however, it was the uppermost house that caught my eye and so I went inside. Once inside I see a comfortable seating space, mood lighting, a window nook, and book-lined shelves, just the kind of place where I could relax and read a book. I walk over to the window nook to observe the scenery past it’s panes, and as I attempt to make space for me to sit and enjoy the view, a little black notebook with a pen inside of it sitting in the window nook catches my eye. It looked to be of fine quality, and the pen was a calligraphy pen, which is not a common writing instrument, but one that can produce the most elegant writing. Curious as to what was being written in this little black book with this unusual pen, I decided to find out what delights it contained. So I pick up the little black book, go and get comfortable on the couch, and open it up to see what’s inside. The first thing that I notice is that the handwriting is clear, precise, and really artistic in nature, so much better than my handwriting which my grandmother would compare to chicken scratch whenever she had to read something that I had handwritten.

Curious about the owner of this wonderful handwriting and what they had been writing in this book, I begin to read the words that have been carefully and meticulously placed on the pages in hopes of learning more about them, and what they were writing about. I come to the conclusion that the writer is a poet as the little black book is filled with pages and pages of poems on various topics which I read for over an hour. I soon discovered that this person with this wonderful handwriting has had some of the same experiences in life that I have had and they have recorded them in the form of poems, and the poems have actually helped look back at various encounters with a new perspective. One poem in particular spoke to me for I too have found myself in a conversation with someone with an inflated opinion of themselves, and I just didn’t know what to make of the situation. The poem reads as follows:

HEROES, HALOS, AND HALLUCINATIONS (Non-traditional Haiku)

If you're a Hero wearing a Halo

And I don't see it

Who's Hallucinating

However, after reading the poem, I gained a new perspective on the person I had encountered, and made the decision that I was not the one who was hallucinating, and that their over-inflated opinion of themselves was their burden to bear and not mine.

My encounter with this little black book and the words deliberately and earnestly written on its pages has offered me a different perspective on a lot of situations I have gone through in my life and of people that I have encountered, and I feel as though I learned a different way to approach them in the future. I was also inspired to buy a little black book of my own so that I too could log my encounters, life lessons, thoughts and opinions for someone else to stumble upon one day, and hopefully gain a new perspective on a situation they find themselves in. Although I am definitely going to have to work on my handwriting so that anyone who stumbles upon the book will be able to read what is written on its pages.