May 16 – Wind Gap. Walked a mile into town on sidewalks overgrown with weeds for a laundry stop and food. In the Monday lull most restaurants were closed, so we (Cosmo, WannaChair, just Wan for short, and I) settled for gas station snacks and pizza delivered to “the laundromat, the one with the tanning booths in the back.” The delivery guy knew which one we meant.
Later, after our hooked thumbs had been ignored by a stream of northerners in clean-looking SUVs, we slogged uphill back to the trail.
Soon we were lost in the woods again, and I lost in thought.
Crazy thoughts, as usual. Like how the world is built by leaps and jumps and dreams. How else do we go from drawing charcoal stick figures on cave walls to cruising at 30,000 feet in multi-ton metal machines complete with plush leather seats and A/C?
Everything we take for granted, electricity, cars, hot water showers, the Internet, at one time they were all just ideas. Dreams in some “crazy” person’s head.
Well, there’s no denying that dreams and imagination are incredibly important, but it seems that now we’re drunk on them. Movies, music, Disneyland, and zoos. We’ve got an unhealthy addiction to fantasy. These things are good in moderation. They inspire us, make us wonder. But the more you indulge in the make-believe the more distant you are from reality.
Take it from somebody who’s read a full library of fantasy and sci-fi novels. Escapism can be revitalizing, but there’s got to be a limit.
Our imagination is a tool to be used as needed, to confront and solve real-world problems. It’s not a drug to liberally indulge in. Because just like any intoxicant, it’s something you can get lost in.
The world we’ve built is at the most fundamental level made possible by our imagination. It’s a testament to the real things that we can bring into being. You can run a hand along a New York’s skyscraper’s plexiglass windows, feel the texture and the strength. Not long ago plexiglass didn’t even exist and we could never have made a building like that.
Plexiglass isn’t the point. We can make other things too. We’re only limited by what we can dream up. The possibilities are endless. That’s the gift we’ve been given.
But when we make a habit of living in fictional worlds, binging the newest Netflix original series, taking pleasure in being spoon-fed material from someone else’s imagination, we can forget to listen to the urgings of our own. We now have access to this amazing ability to vicariously experience a million different fictitious realities through social media, redbox flicks, and libraries full of the newest dramas, but it often seems to distract us from the important task of developing our own reality, arguably our most valuable work of art, and a gift to the world.
You can see this kind of diseased thinking everywhere you look now. Just as an impromptu example consider the fact that House of Cards, a brilliantly written but inconsequential drama about American politics, most likely has a larger and more devoted following than American politics itself.
Fantasy supersedes reality. I know I’m not the only one who can see the scary implications of this. If the show has a plot twist, people lose their minds. If, on the other hand, the US assents to war on an amoebic and abstract idea (I assume we can agree that terror takes more than one form and comes from more than one place and can’t be blown up with a smart-bomb) nobody notices or really seems to care.
But damn, here I am rambling again.
I’ll admit sometimes I get carried away
Trying to slow down and just walk. And breath — Nomad