The Fiction of Reality

The things we believe in as kids are parallel what we believe in later in life. Santa Claus is no longer a jolly fat guy that brings you gifts. He is replaced with the thought of a beautiful blond with a killer body and a great personality that you settle down with and attends to your every whim. The Easter Bunny becomes the thought that no matter how hard you party the night before you will wake up feeling bright eyed and bushy tailed in the morning as you head to your dream job. I am not sure what the Jewish conversion is to these metaphors, but I think it involves Hanukkah Harry and a Dreidel. The truth is these ‘fantastical beliefs’ we create in our life are just that, figments of our collective imagination that we have picked up from our friends through legendary college stories and of course every movie and television show centered around that “twenty something crowd”. There is nothing wrong with believing this stuff when you are young, but there is a time in your life when you get to old to believe in finding that perfect person and you settle. There is a time when you have to realize you are too old to go drinking 5 nights a week and still hold down a ‘career.’ Sure some people hang onto these ‘silly’ ideas, like the high school girl that still believes in the tooth fairy, these are also the ones that end up later in life ‘Hello my name is Jim and I’m a…”

Letting go of your ‘Santa Claus’ doesn’t mean you are settling for complete crap or you won’t be happy, but you are settling for less than that perfect person that you have dreamed of since you first heard the term ‘soul mate.’ At some point we all have to settle. It hurts to think of it as settling, but the fact remains that no one is perfect, for if there was that perfect person you wouldn’t be settling for anything less than Mr/Miss perfect. This second option is as close as you are going to get or at least that is what you tell yourself. You really have no way of knowing if there is someone who might be closer to your vision of perfection, which is why it is always a gamble when you finally decide to settle down long term with a second option. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a gamble if you are willing to put on the blinders and stop you’re wandering eyes, but to do that means to ultimately give up on perfection. Making every love story a tragedy cloaked in the disguise of a Shakespearian comedy.

Killing your adult Easter bunny is just as unsettling as moving in with your second choice. It is the first time you truly realize that you are first mortal and second that you have converted from being adult to grown-up. No longer can you go out on a Tuesday night and get care freely blitzed, you have concerns, limitations, constraints of all types to deal with. You have people counting on you to be fully effective on Wednesday, you have responsibilities in your life that you didn’t have when you were 22. Your concerns have grown from trying to deal with an upper level economics class to dealing with trying to make the big sale to your company’s biggest client. You have realized that there are no redoes, bonus points, or cliff notes to help bail you out. This doesn’t happen over night of course, it is a slow and painful realization, and then it hits you like a ford truck running over your pet Rabbit.
This is life; it is full of multiple realizations, good and bad. You find your list of limitations growing, leaving you at times in a panic stricken state. No matter what, you find strength from deep inside that allows you to grind through it all, till your race is won. Ironically, in this race winning is death, so no real pressure to finish first.