Reality
I recently read a magazine article about a young woman who left her native country to be educated abroad. While abroad, she was taught a romantic, idealistic view of her native country. The romantic view was shared by the scholars who educated her, pundits who reported on her native country and many of her fellow students and acquaintances. When she returned to her native country, she was forced to confront reality, a world that was completely different. She learned that all she had been taught by strangers about her native country was wrong. As she put it, she had to "de-educate" herself. Once she accepted reality she became one of the most successful people in her country. This got me thinking about reality and and how difficult it can be when we stray from it. Sometimes we have to "de-educate" ourselves from our dreams and deal with reality.
I think all of us have a secret place in our minds where we live in the perfect world. People who have what seems to be the perfect life usually find imperfections in some measure and dream of a life without those imperfections. They dream of a world where they are younger, richer, whatever they view as missing. People who have nothing dream of a world where they have everything. We all in some measure have a vision of the perfect world and we all, sometimes, live in that perfect world in our minds.
The same thing sometimes happens when we think of the past. In the way our memories seem to work,, the past is always better in retrospect than it was at the time. The bad things that happened in the past are forgotten and the good things are romanticized. We think of the past as golden and wish for a time that never existed.
There's nothing wrong with dreaming, with thinking of a perfect world. There's nothing wrong with fondly reminiscing, with idealizing the past. But when we begin to live exclusively or predominantly in the secret place, or when we begin to look only backward, we lose our ability to function in the real world. We not only stop trying to do the things we can do to make things better for ourselves and others, we lose our ability to be contented with what we have, where we are, in the real world.
Do whatever you can to make things better, dream of a better world. But accept the way things are and proceed from there. Don't assume the dream and be constantly insulted by reality. Be contented with reality and things will only get better.
8-29-05
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