Buckle your seatbelt. We’re going for a drive in Fake World today.
A place we invent where what happened shouldn’t have happened. Where what didn’t happen should have happened. A crossroads we invent where there is none, all to avoid facing an uncomfortable truth somewhere in our past.
A truth we weren’t able to face then, and maybe aren’t able to face even now.
So what do we do? We invent a parallel amusement park where we keep what actually happened in suspended animation. “Yes, my parents separated but they shouldn’t have,” “He treated me badly, but he shouldn’t have,” “We lost the game, but we shouldn’t have.”
Suddenly, like the polaroid in Back to the Future, our present lives start to morph into what we’re changing about the past. A present in which maybe our parents are still together. Where he didn’t treat me badly. Where we won the big game.
A Maybe World, A Happy World… where we don’t really have to face the feelings that would come with admitting that the world didn’t go the way we wanted it to. That we don’t always get what we want. And because we’re not able to face the feeling, we push it back, we delay the lesson… sometimes for 30 or 40 years. We blame someone else, we con ourselves into thinking we control the world… even though the evidence clearly doesn’t support it.
But what if The World not going our way was actually the way it was trying to help us go deeper into it, to learn from it? To allow it to hurt us and to still stand strong? To suffer in it and yet… still love it, still accept it?
I read somewhere that spiritual growth is like walking into the ocean and getting knocked down by the waves. Every two minutes you get knocked down, then you stand up again and keep walking. The waves never stop coming, but eventually you stop noticing them, because 1) you know they are going to keep coming and knock you down, and 2) you know you are going to get right back up again.
So on the day we find ourselves at the crossroads for the thousandth time, we can say, “Ok, World, I don’t understand why this is happening to me, but I acknowledge that it did. I do want to trust You that what happened is for the best, please just help me to understand how. I am ready to learn my lesson here, I am ready to change.”
And suddenly, like Pinocchio finally going to school, the Fake World disappears – and the Real You is here!
Joy Biscuits 