4 - Change and Reality

Toye Oyelese

Hello, and welcome back to Navigating Blind. I'm Dr. Toye Oyelese. If you happened to catch the last episode, you might remember me getting a bit tangled up in the whole question of outcomes—how, when you peel back enough layers, everything boils down to want versus don't want. But today, let's zoom way out, and talk about the thing under it all: change. Or, maybe to put it the way I see it in clinic, or looking through my camera in the Okanagan, reality—and how slippery it is.

Toye Oyelese

Now, I get asked, “What do you mean, reality is chaos?”—and, I should clarify, I don’t mean life is disordered, like my garage after a weekend project. It's more like, at every level you care to look—atoms, your cells, weather, your neighbor’s moods—everything’s always shifting. It's movement, in every direction, all the time. Without that change, existence would just... freeze. Nothing would happen. No movie, just a single frame forever. I’m sure the physicists and philosophers could make it sound fancier, but that's how I wrap my head around it.

Toye Oyelese

You know, there’s this Greek fellow, Heraclitus, who said, “You never step in the same river twice.” When I stumbled on that—years after I’d already started rambling to anyone who’d listen about constant change—I felt a bit less strange. I thought, alright, Toye, maybe this perspective is almost baked into humans, no matter the century.

Toye Oyelese

I see it whenever I’m waiting for just the right slant of sunlight in the Okanagan Valley. Sometimes, I’ll stand behind the lens, waiting, thinking, “Well, I've got five seconds—maybe less—before the light shifts, and that moment’s gone forever. The hills, the lake, my own mood with it.” No matter how patient you are, you can’t pause reality. You catch what you can, and then it all flows forward.

Toye Oyelese

So, here's where it gets even trickier—and I promise, I’m building toward something practical. When we say “reality,” we’re almost never talking about what’s really out there. The world itself—the territory—is, well, far too wild, too uncontainable for our little minds. What we end up doing, whether we mean to or not, is drawing up a map. Our beliefs, our habits, even our language; those are all simplifying shortcuts. The map’s useful, no doubt. I mean, if you’ve ever tried to pick your way through Vancouver without some sort of plan, you’ll know—the map helps you survive, maybe even get to where you want to go. But if you start confusing the map with the territory, things get weird fast.

Toye Oyelese

People sometimes push back on this. “Are you saying reality’s just an illusion, then?” Not quite. The way I see it, reality’s out there, doing its thing. It’s just that we can’t ever take in the whole thing directly. Our mind gives us snapshots, shortcuts, best guesses. Even as a physician, half the challenge is knowing what I don’t know rather than what I do. That’s why the null hypothesis always wins: what I don’t know, or can’t even imagine, will always be a thousand times larger than the little sliver that ends up on my map.

Toye Oyelese

So, there’s a question lingering, right? If I can never fully see the territory—never have a perfect map—how much faith should I put in the version of reality that I’m using, especially when things go sideways? I mean, in a crisis or under stress, we all cling a bit tighter to our maps, but sometimes those very maps lead us in the wrong direction. And, if you push this even further, it’s maybe a little humbling—you realize you’re always navigating blind, but you still have to keep walking.

Toye Oyelese

Alright, so, practically, what do you do with all this? Here’s where I usually talk about the honest middle ground. Almost everyone, at some point, falls into one of two traps: thinking “I can control outcomes” on the one hand, or “nothing I do matters” on the other. I’ve been guilty of both, and let me tell you, neither ends well.

Toye Oyelese

If you believe you control outcomes, you’re basically denying the real chaos at play—the weather, the choices of other people, the random potholes on your drive to work. I used to think, if I just worked hard enough, prepared well enough, I could guarantee admission to medical school. Life set me straight.

Toye Oyelese

Then there’s the other delusion: that nothing you do matters. That’s its own kind of defeat—a way of shrinking until you disappear. But, the truth is, your actions—what you choose to do right now—do change the mix. You become one more variable in a vast system, nudging probabilities ever so slightly.

Toye Oyelese

The lesson really hammered home for me during those months in Toronto, working in a chemical factory. My goal was medical school, but all I could really control—outside of that giant machinery clanging around me—was the next application essay, the shift I volunteered for, the chapter of a textbook I forced myself to read after work. I couldn’t influence the admissions committee, the applicant pool, luck. But every bit of energy I put into my daily tasks nudged the odds in my favor. Not a guarantee, just a tilt.

Toye Oyelese

So, here’s the tool I keep coming back to—and maybe you’ve heard me mumble about this in clinic: stack up good seconds. If you can line them up—seconds spent doing things that are, let’s say, heading in the right direction—those can bundle into good minutes. Minutes gather into hours, hours into days. The future isn’t something you control, but you can keep nudging the probabilities in your favor. Survive first, then aim to thrive—not because the world has promised you a victory, but because those aligned actions matter, right in the middle of the chaos.

Toye Oyelese

Well, that wraps it up for today. Next time, I’ll be exploring SW plus A plus T equals D—the odd equation by which, accidentally and a bit awkwardly, I learned the power and burden of influencing direction, back when I was just a stubborn thirteen-year-old. Until then, remember—survive first, then thrive. Thanks for walking with me through the chaos. See you soon.