News flash … I don’t rule the world. Neither of us does. You and I are just regular people. My sphere of influence is small. I am guessing yours is too. If you happen to have a large sphere of influence, please help a girl out. I need a bigger audience if I am ever to successfully find a literary agent. K thanx! Anyway, do you ever feel small world frustration? Like, if you were to go beyond your typical 20 square mile stomping grounds you will fall off the edge of the earth? I definitely feel that sometimes.
Books have always been my go-to world extenders. When I read, I so thoroughly get into the story I lose track of time. I completely check out to the point I am grouchy when I put the book down because I didn’t want to re-enter reality. I am like that with movies too. I always feel disoriented leaving a movie theater. As magical as it feels to be transported for a period of time, I am guilty too often of placating my small world frustration with escapism. There’s nothing wrong with a break, but I believe there is a much better solution for small world problems.
When my younger brother was really small he was extremely shy. He was hide-behind-Mother’s-leg shy. He wanted no part of anything or anyone not in our nuclear family. Something curious happened, though, just before his 6th birthday. He declared that on his 6th birthday he was not going to be shy anymore. I remember chuckling at that. I didn’t believe shyness was a thing someone could just declare they wouldn’t be anymore. Odd thing is, my brother must have been banking his words. On his 6th birthday, he started talking and we couldn’t get him to stop. He woke up talking and only stopped when he went to sleep. We had to pass him around. We would just tell him someone was calling him and he would go to whoever we said and take up where he left off. He drove us kind of nuts. He was like that for years. All these years later, I think he was on to something..not the too many words part, but the indiscriminate subject part. Greg wanted to know everything. It did not matter to him who you were, what you looked like, or what you were up to. He just wanted to hang out and have a conversation.
I am of the opinion that one of the things that keeps our worlds really small is our tightly held ideals. We stick to the comfort zone of the small circles of people who think like us. We hide behind our ideologies and want nothing to do with anything or anyone outside our circle. We become so ideologically inbred that we go blind and deaf to the rest of the world. Lots of ugliness and divisiveness springboards from that place when we become closed and dismissive. I am not saying having ideals and strongly held beliefs is bad. What I am saying is everyone is better served by us all being willing to hang out and have a conversation. We stand to learn so much. We are finite beings, incapable of knowing it all. Our small worlds grow when we are willing to let other people in, love them, and be okay to agree to disagree.
In my last post, I said cost is what we trade to take an action and consequence is what we get from taking an action. I proposed spendable soft currencies we possess like time, energy, comfort and ideals. I think spending ideals looks like loosening our white-knuckled grip on what we believe is right long enough to sit with someone who believes differently and really hear them. When we successfully do that, the consequences are often many and great. When we spend some ideals, we stand to reap the consequence of understanding, unity, harmony … so many things. The truly wonderful thing about it is we can hold our tightly held beliefs with one hand while holding the hand of someone with different tightly held beliefs. Believe it or not, we can love and value people who believe differently than us. In this fallen world, unity will never grow from ideological purity but rather from an honest willingness to spend a little of ourselves for others.
