All A Game

I noted last time that...

Most people are very tightly gripped by the hoo-haw of swirling drama they opted into, suspending disbelief to orchestrate the most thorough possible immersion. No one's born a diehard Yankee's fan. One starts with mild interest, and eventually voluntarily works oneself into a crazed froth where absolutely everything hinges on playoff results. Baseball's just a game, sure, but we can easily will ourselves to forget that. And everything on this planet - even your most sacred and meaningful stuff - is like that. It's all a mere game you chose to invest in. This is a light world for light entertainment in which we invest - to enhance the emotional ride - to the nth degree. But, in the end, every bit of it is "just a game".

We get it with baseball. Even kooky die-hard fans whose cars are plastered with team stickers, who never miss a game, and who live or die based on final scores will readily admit, with a dopey smirk, that, sure, it's just a game.

But how about your mortgage payments? When the Yankees lose, nobody comes and takes your house away. The consequences are steeper, so the stress and fear level seem more appropriate. It's no game!!!

Unless, that is, the whole living-in-a-house thing is also a game. And that, I fully understand, is a much harder sell, though, yes, that, too, is ultimately a game.

You'll be fine. You'll find another living space. It might suck. You may be uncomfortable for a short or long while, and you may need to undergo things you'd previously declared Unacceptable.

But the universe hardly heeds such declarations. In fact, again and again over the years, it's inflicted upon you the Unacceptable, yet here you are, perfectly fine. It escapes our attention (because it would interrupt our willful suspension of disbelief) that every happy regular person is a survivor of multiple encounters with the supposedly Unthinkable. So maybe the problem is in those silly red lines we draw rather than in our outcomes.

Anyway, you'll live in this house, or some other house, or a homeless shelter, or a sleeping bag in the woods. You and your kids may cry and gnash your teeth, but it will all play out while swathed in delicious life-giving oxygen and sunlight on the only colorful and salubrious world in a cold, dark, vacuous, instantly-deadly universe.

FRAMING!!!

But what about bona fide tragedy, e.g. your kid (god forbid) getting cancer? I gently tackled that in one of my more provocative postings, "Why 'God' Lets Bad Things Happen" (keep that page open in case you read all the way through this posting and feel you need more). Now I'll tackle it a bit less gently.

First, you have to trust me on this: I've found (and been corroborated by those who've spent their lives working at lucid dreaming) that while we remember dreams as thin, sketchy experiences, they're not that way at the time. The thin sketchiness is in our poor recollection, not in the original experiencing. The dream world is as real-seeming as ours while we're in it, even though its operating laws are a bit different (e.g. you can fly, events are less linear, and time flows less smoothly).

The following comes with a trigger warning. It may spur disorientation because you'll realize, with gnawing discomfort, that it's true; this is something you've known and forgotten tens of thousands of times. So it's a surprise that packs a powerful punch of deja vu:

Every morning, when you open your eyes, you leave behind loved ones.

Do you mourn? Do you try to get back? No. You trudge blithely into the bathroom and pee.

Strong suggestion: read (or re-read) this.