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Thank you for the deep comment! Reality is all around us. We can't avoid it, even though some of us REALLY try! There is a whole entertainment industry, and unfortunately a whole drug and alcohol culture that is geared towards escaping reality. The entertainment industry is usually benign and a good thing for us, a chance to listen to a good song, see a good movie and escape reality for that period of time and regroup. Of course the other escapist routes are self-damaging and damaging to our societies as a whole. There are so many studies and statistics about drugs and alcohol that I won't even go into that, but we lose way too many young people to these types of escape.
My escape growing up was the radio. Sometimes it was like the singers on there were commiserating with me, or even trying to cheer me up. I had tape recorders and remember spending hours taping my favorite songs to listen to in the afternoon after school. I needed that escape.
My youngest son loves movies! He would watch them 24/7 if I would let him! He has a specific learning disability and finds school very difficult. He also has two big brothers who get to do everything socially before he does. He has a father who he adores, but who has a mental illness that he's not appropriately treating and often does not show him the love and compassion that he needs when he's at his house. Two hours of watching computer animated animals discovering their native homeland, or futuristic robots cleaning up our planet, fits his bill for escape from the harsher parts of his reality.
We all do it. As the saying goes, "no one said that life was gonna be easy!". So, we do our best to make our own reality as pain free as we possibly can.
So, how should we look at reality? Of course, there are the realities of our lives with our parents. There are the realities of our lives with our children. There are the realities of our lives in our schools. There are the realities of our lives with our friends. There are the realities of our parent's families that we are a part of. There are the realities of our parent's social network. There are the realities that government and social policy imposes on us. There is the reality that historical events have brought us. There are the realities of the culture that we grew up in. There is the reality that our ethnic group holds.
Our environment to a great extent imposes on us our reality. The way people treat us gives us a sense of worth or worthlessness. The things that we see can shape our opinions of things. Other's attitudes can "rub off" and become our own. That is how prejudice and ignorance are still out there in our world today. Our morals are usually comparable to those of the people we grew up with. Our beliefs are usually those of the family that we were born into.
Of course, along the way, we pick up our own ideas. What we were born into is a starting place. A place to observe, experience and then go out into the world and try on different aspects of it and decide what's in it that is "ours". Our things that appeal to us on some level that gives us each our own unique identity. That gives us the "I believe that" feeling, that this idea or thing, is a part of us.
Honestly, we cannot isolate ourselves from reality. We are going to grow and develop whether we like it or not. Some people don't like it, and dig their heels in and refuse to change or grow or listen to any view point that is not their own. I think that that is sad. It only limits their experiences and keeps them from reaching their potential as a Universal soul. If you stifle your own development, you only have yourself to blame.
Until next blog!
Love, Angelia
amsc363@cs.com
gtown.healinghouse@gmail.com |
