Yesterday, I examined the dirth of curiosity that sprung from cell phones and Covid. Today, I tackle a far more challenging subject, reengaging the world. I think the whole of society asked for a separation agreement during the pandemic, and now is grasping and gasping at the horror of getting back into socializing on purpose.
Before Covid, I plunged fearlessly into everything, but the pandemic plus stage three breast cancer kicked me back into the safety of my house for a good three years, and I’m only starting to force myself to go out the door again.
However, life and all its demands require engagement and I’m recognzing how atrophied those eager beaver emotional muscles are. I used to long to get invovled, to do everything. Likewise, writing was a fearless endeavor –write and hit publish and off you go. Somewhere in the course of things, I grew cautious, and the writing likewise, lost some of its salt. Looking at younger me, I recognized the reticence that crept into my words and slowly but surely began strangling them and my imagination. I’d gone several weeks where writing remained an afterthougtht, if thought of at all. I fretted as I didn’t write, was I a writer? Was I taking a break? Was I just being lazy?
Answer…no, not intentionally, and yes in that order. Writers write, and I was letting myself just be –well one can just be, but if you just are, one thing you aren’t, is a writer. Writing requires purposefulness. It requires stepping out there.
However, it isn’t just me.
The whole world seems tepid about living. We want something better, but someone else should fix it before we go out there –and so the metaverse or the multiverse or the online versus in real life, is the padded, santized for your protection world we want rather than the real.
The Multiverse allows one to imagine in one version, we get it right, so it doesn’t have to be this one, or that all of them cummulatively result in us getting it right, so even our mistakes and missteps don’t matter. Meanwhile, the Metaverse allows us to create a reality where there are no dustbunnies or scrapped knees or leftovers, and thus we don’t have to think about work that doesn’t pay, games or play that might hurt, or waste, or our waist. There is no visible sacrifice in the metaverse except the real world and time and relationships that we shunt to the side for the satisfaction of an unshareable unreal dreamscape.
We will remain unreal, because we are not allowing ourselves to love and be loved. Souls will only be transformed and made less isolated by actually encountering others, which the metaverse, like the internet, makes more difficult.
We need to become, a Velveteen people.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
The world is constantly telling us in the news, “Don’t step out there.” because you could get hurt, fired, harrassed, You could be insulted, ignored, dismissed, rejected, fleeced, or worse. The world hurts. So don’t call. Don’t reach out. Young people don’t date. They don’t take long term risks on jobs or moves or relationships or homes.
They want the safetynet. Childhood seems safer. Except it isn’t when you’re not a child.
Being real means being willing to risk being broken, and to risk beyond that, being loved when you aren’t visibly what you once were.
There are dragons and trolls and orcs out there. The world boasts of far more dangerous things like magic rings that promise what they do not deliver. In the real world, people promise that if you grasp at power, you’ll win the world. What they don’t tell you is the cost. There are others who only tell you that everything costs, without acknowledging the price paid for not trying.
Right now, my house is quiet except for the sounds of a video game that most people are playing, “Tears of the Kingdom.”
What they don’t realize, is that the real tears come when we don’t let ourselves actually engage in the real adventure of life. The online or virtual version is so much cleaner and easier. We can win at that one. The reality is, reality is a game we should be seeking to win, or we will find we lose touch with it. Adulthood is difficult. However, infinite childhood is a sad story, because every Peter Pan becomes a Captain Hook if they stay in Neverland.
I need to go turn off a few machines. It’s going to get real.
Follow Up: I turned off the machines, and two of my children listened to two chapters of Watership Down, and after four of them played (and trounced me) Uno. Prayers and laughter followed. Moral of the story: What the title said..Dare to be real.
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