I used to live in Columbus, Ohio, a city that tempts you to stay without noise forcing you to leave. Yet, I often traveled to Cincinnati, a city lacking in splendor but strangely close to my emotions, like a room in memory I never entered but know well.

One autumn evening, dim light and silent air, I was crossing long roads toward Cincinnati, while distances seeped into my soul as if memories from a life I have not yet lived. I was not searching for anything specific, but the city’s landscape on the roadside alerted something inside me — a kind of alert that cannot be explained but felt, as if approaching an old appointment with a dormant part of myself.

In this city, in 1922, philosopher and scientist Thomas Kuhn was born. He did not change the world materially but changed how we perceive it. He coined the concept of the “paradigm,” the hidden framework shaping our vision and governing our interpretation of things.

Call this framework whatever you want: glasses, map, angle, lens… but essentially it means the accumulation humans have: experiences, information, beliefs formed through education, repeated experience, and the heart’s contact with life.

The paradigm is that mental and emotional stockpile where a person stores their interpretations and decides how to see, understand, and interact.

Every situation we go through, every scene we witness, we do not see as it is but as allowed by the hidden lens we carry inside us.

I stopped at the city’s outskirts, not to explore but because I felt the meaning itself dwells there, waiting for someone to greet it. I checked into a simple hotel with a window overlooking a long street that seemed like the city’s umbilical artery. I sat by the glass, lit a dim light, and took out my old notebook, the one I write in when language tightens and questions widen.

On the first page, I found a sentence I wrote years ago:

“The world is not seen as it is, but as we are.”

I once thought I understood its meaning, but like every true idea, it grew silently inside me, waiting for the moment of vision.

Whenever I tried to escape it, it whispered to me from behind events.

I raised my head. The city was dimming its lights as if preparing to sleep. The distant windows kept blinking like a restless memory… blinking not to reveal but to indicate the unsaid.

I whispered barely audible:

The paradigm is not information in a book…

It is the way we reinterpret everything we know.

It is the being we inhabit while thinking we see the world as it is.

It is the mold in which we shape our meanings and reorder life through it.

I turned off the light and returned to bed. The city was quiet as if listening to my last thought.

I said to myself:

Maybe life does not change much…

But if we change the glasses of the mind,

We may see it — for the first time — as we never saw before.