On a lazy Saturday morning when you’re lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, there is a space where fantasy and reality become one.
~ Lynn Johnston
Category: reality
Getting Older Changes Your Reality
How many times have you said “I wish I knew then what I know now”?
Makes getting older sound much more appealing, doesn’t it?
It is a basic fact that older people have a larger pool of information to pull from when it comes to shaping their reality. Many years worth of pooling.
And not all that’s drawn from the pool is useful.
Would middle schoolers benefit from the knowledge that other kids can be bullies and things brighten up once they get to high school? Would college kids be more successful if they knew the intricacies of moving up in the working world? Would millennials be better off if they realized how important health care and savings plans will be thirty years in their future?
Unfortunately, human beings learn from personal experience. Not that all personal experiences are soul building and world awakening. I have never smoked in my life but I knew then and know now how bad a habit it is. I’ve never had a broken bone nor had an emotional trauma experience before I was 25.
Does that mean I should have experienced all of the above to be a more well rounded senior adult?
When I chose the topic Getting Older Changes Your Reality I was thinking about reality from a senior point of view. My body has changed, my energy level has changed, my hormones definitely have changed, forcing me to adapt in ways I never imagined when I was 30.
These kinds of changes cannot be planned for. You can be fit all of your life and still lack energy to hike to the furthest soccer field. You could watch your sugar intake all your life and still turn into a diabetic. You could go to college and major in Anthropology just to work on computers in a bank 10 years later. (I knew someone that happened to…)
What you can Do and what you can Be changes as your reality changes. You may have wanted one child and would up with three. You may have wanted to move to Paris when you were young and still find yourself in suburbia. Often your youthful reality is not your future reality.
One pleasant surprise of my senior reality is that I’m finally getting to do some the things I wanted to do in my youthful reality. I’ve touched the Eiffel Tower and walked through Roman ruins. I’ve had wonderful grandkids who have made me feel young again (mentally, at least), and have the time to continue art art projects I started in my 20s.
I still worry about money and my health and if I’ll wake up tomorrow to enjoy another day. But those are things I have minimum control over, so I do what I can and let time take the wheel.
As you get older you find that the things you worry about today won’t matter much tomorrow. You have no say about political candidates, company policies, and illness such as cancer. You have no control over who lives and who passes on. You don’t even really know if there’s an afterlife.
Getting older changes your reality, and you finally get that you have less control over you life than you thought. What will be will be and all that.
All you can do is choose the swirly bumpy road instead of the straight one, and see what happens.
You will wind up at the same place anyway.
I Love the Impossible
It’s funny how often we are expected to suspend belief in how things work in order to be entertained.
I myself am somewhat a “duh” when it comes to technical anything, so I am one of those people who barely know the difference between possible and impossible. Real experiences and CGI. Possibility and Impossibility.
I am one of those people who watch movies and say “Can they really do that?”
There are many movies in which what they’re doing is impossible. Liquid nitrogen freezing bodies instantly. Stealing $160 million from a casino right under security’s nose. Hijackers taking over Air Force One. Outrunning fireballs and jumping through glass walls and not getting cut. Hacking government computers.
I mean, all those ideas help move the plot forward. What’s more exciting than a tank of piranhas eating someone alive in an instant? What’s better than hot wiring some ancient alien rig to so you can ride like a cowboy across the land? Or riding on a cable from one flying airplane to another before it runs out of fuel?
I love being entertained. And I love watching something that sits right at the edge of impossible.
Now, I know there is no such thing as training raptors or landing on a space station half way between the moon and earth. That there are no such things as three-headed dogs or fire-breathing dragons. No such scenarios as ghosts befriending homeowners or dogs that talk.
But through the magic of today’s technology, all of that is possible.
For all the madness and sadness around each of us, it is still a wonderful time to be alive. Anything you can imagine, movies can create. You can really feel like you are hacking through the middle of the jungle, wandering through the ancient pyramids, standing side-by-side with the emperor of the Qin Dynasty, or walking deep under ground through the worlds of dwarves.
Books have been around for centuries, successfully spinning the same sort of tales, but only in the last 20 years can you actually see something that does not exist.
How they do it I have no idea. Like magicians and their tricks, I’m not sure I want to know how it’s done. I’d rather float in the pool of ignorance and have a good time believing the impossible.
There is nothing wrong with being fooled by the magic of technology and the possibilities of the mind. The singer/actress Cher sums it up best:
“Until you’re ready to look foolish, you’ll never have the possibility of being great.”
Humoring the Goddess 