Reality

I was at Subway tonight with a friend after the State of the Union and a thought flashed through my mind that was important enough to pull out a pen and write it down on the back of the receipt – I always have a pen in my pocket, don’t you? Here’s my thought. Reality – feeling, accepting, dealing with reality – is just another form of escape from reality. Or, conversely, escaping from reality is just another way of dealing with reality.
What’s real to you? It’s hard to know, isn’t it. How do you deal with the parts of reality you don’t like? Do you drink? Smoke? Overwork? Study constantly? Read? Keep yourself so busy you don’t have time to remind yourself of the things you’d rather not remember anyway? You have a form of escape. You might not call it that. You might not know it’s that. You might tell yourself – or you might be told – that what you’re doing is helping you with reality. And maybe it is. But isn’t it a form of escape?
Let me reemphasize my point. Accepting reality is just another form of escape. By thinking that you’ve come to terms with whatever your reality is, aren’t you also escaping from not knowing how to face reality. A very real, scary, Catch-22. There are lots of them. Your reality may be that you think you have accepted reality. Which means you’re running from reality. Or if you’re not running from reality, you are running from reality, because you think you’re not running from it. Scared yet? That’s the reality I see.

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