Everyone experiences the world through their own windows. We each represent the whole. We learn something different than everyone else. We keep the parts that only we can truly understand because of their unique relationship to our journey, and then share by doing our best to express the inner truth that builds inside, layers upon layers as they are flowed through our respective connective rides. There is so much to love that it is almost as if it is everyone's duty to love a variety of the world's offerings. Enjoy what the world brings. Go with whatever makes your soul sing.
__________________________________________
Text Book Reading : "Make an Impact"
We finished the week learning about changing the world. The vocabulary words ranged from words that described motivated people who change the world to those who don't want to change anything. One such word was "escapist." The root is obviously "escape," but what is an escapist escaping from? The answer, supposedly, is reality. But what isn't part of reality? What makes reality so real, as opposed to whatever else you would call things you experience or perceive while participating in reality?
I write about these things here because there's no way I could get that deep during a class taught to mostly immigrants who are trying to learn the language. I explained to the class that escapist activities are anything you do that take you away from your reality. But what is one's reality? Isn't everything you experience technically your reality, even if it's vicarious? I guess we need to be more specific and say that escapism involves spending your time doing something that is not representative of the rest of your immediate reality that can be affected by your actions, and the majority of escapist activities involve no action on one's part. For example, watching sports, movies or any form of televised entertainment doesn't involve the viewer doing anything to affect the outcome of the experience. You can enjoy, dislike or scream in anger/ecstasy during those various experiences, but all because of something that had no real relationship to you. It doesn't even know you're here. Beyond that, there are escapist activities that can involve your participation, such as video games, role playing games with other people, and even travel, which is about as literally escapist as you can get.
The group basically agreed that everyone participates in escapism to some extent, and that sometimes it is even healthy and completely desirable. Anything beyond perceiving your direct surroundings and circumstances would technically be escapist. And so what if it is? Escapism can relieve tension, energize you, or give your mind enough of a break from the real issues you have to deal with so that you can be rested and return with better focus and determination. Although meditation supposedly involves going into inner realms of one's mind and spirit which sometimes feel realer than everything else, the truth is that it is inherently ignorant of immediate surroundings and involvement with the "outside world." But it's been shown to be very healthy, therapeutic and perhaps even spiritually cleansing to go inside yourself and meditate as a means of connecting with the larger world. And I think that's whole idea: connecting with the source of the larger world, which includes your source.
There is obviously the negative side of escapism... as with anything else. This occurs when your escapist activity removes you from reality to such an extent that you're not interested in the real world outside, or that you forget how to participate and enjoy the rest the world has to offer, which, at the top of the list, would probably be human interaction, and at the least, quiet contented contemplation of the wondrous world around you, at least at some point in your experience.
One of the examples of the many possible escapist activities we discussed at length in class was the emotional viewing of sporting activities. The key word is "emotional." Viewing anything can be fun, instructive, entertaining and shared with others. But with sports, you have absolutely 100% no control over the outcome. It is not the result of anything you have done or chosen to do or believe in your life. You can't do anything about it, and what's more, unlike politics or the weather or something happening to someone you love, it won't actually affect your life at all beyond the mental power you've already handed over. I say this as someone who spent much of his youth and teenage years worrying about games involving my favorite teams, yelling at the TV, standing in certain places and refusing to move when my team did well, and even screaming at players on my favored team because they weren't playing well enough. When they won, I was usually happy for a little while. When they lost, I felt like somehow I had lost, because I was rooting for them, and I was very mad. The few times a championship was earned, it felt great when it happened, and for the rest of the night, and maybe the next day at school, but then I noticed that nobody else liked my team except a few other people. It seemed more divisive than inclusive, which is probably when I realized that I was not as interested in choosing sides in competitive sports as I used to be. I still loved playing them, more than ever actually, and watching them as entertainment filled with amazing inspiring activity, intensity, and often welcomed suspense over the outcome. But nothing that could truly shake your appreciation of the rest of the world as it was at the time. Besides, soon, nobody was talking about your team winning it anymore. They were already speculating about next year.
The first team I loved and followed the entire season resulting in a championship was Duke basketball. It wasn't even the professional level, but something about the 64 team tournament, all of the upsets defying the numbered projections, predictions and statistics, the true heart of it all, the team efforts outshining the isolation ego displays so frequent once they get paid in the NBA, and the downright excellent excitement created by game after game that had the potential to and often did end with some last second buzzer-beating beautiful basket. The truth was I LOVED basketball, playing it every chance I got, even when it was winter and I had to wear gloves in the driveway and dribble on icy earth. And I loved the NCAA tournament, or March Madness as they called it. And I really loved it when my favorite chosen team, the Duke Blue Devils, won the 2001 NCAA tournament. I loved it even more because I had followed their every move since the preseason. In fact, I'd followed every team since the preseason (and there are many teams), so I felt like I knew the whole game everyone was playing. In fact, I won the tournament pool by picking the most correct victories, and got to watch my team triumph. Afterward I stopped caring so much. I still followed intensely my senior year, and was mad when Duke lost in the third round to Indiana, but was in reality much more angry about my recent break-up with my girlfriend. Duke losing was just another bitter blow when I was down. There were a few times in college when they got pretty far and played UConn, a team I have hated even before I liked Duke, but besides that I didn't pay much attention. In fact, I renounced being a Duke fan in 2007 because I'd read a Tom Wolfe book about a college closely modeled after Duke, and the basketball program depicted was not something I wanted to support. I picked them to lose in the first round for the first time since I was 11, and they did. I pretty much stopped paying attention after that. I think I secretly rooted for them in the tournament in the next two years, but didn't really watch many of the games. I was thinking about a lot of other things then.
A few years later I was in Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, waiting for another bus to Laos to come the next day because nobody had woken me up for my bus earlier that morning, despite my request for a wake-up call. So I wandered around and came back to the hotel to use the internet, and it turned out that there was one minute left in the championship game, Duke was playing an underdog named Butler, and it was tied. Basically Butler barely missed an amazing half-court shot at the buzzer, which would have won the game. When the shot was in the air I thought, "I can't really truly root against this team I used to love, and it would be pretty awesome if my favorite team in my favorite sport won the championship during my journey... but I can't root against the underdog either. And if the shot goes in...wow!" Of course, it didn't go in, and I enjoyed a Duke win. Then I went to Laos and pretty much stopped thinking about it. Although I think I wrote a web log with basketball metaphors a few weeks later, now that I think about it...
This sports obsession was an example of escapism without any positive consequences. I invested lots of emotional energy, heart health, well-being and irrefutable time hoping and praying and wishing and sitting on my butt while other people worked really hard to play a fun yet incredibly challenging and pressurized game, with opportunities ranging from supreme jubilation to utter embarrassment.
Meanwhile, traveling wasn't really escapism at all. I may not have been at a steady job, but I didn't have a steady job path in my life yet anyway. I'd been working, but always in something different, while consistently reading and usually writing. But I considered myself in more of a learning phase back then anyway. Once I felt like I had read, written and worked at uninspiring jobs enough, I began exploring the world with my fresh eyes, intrigued and endlessly curious about how other people lived their journeys and which prizes were possibilities. Their wondrous talents, passions, creations and loves filled me with energy and humility. I wanted to see, be and free the best I could. I never thought of it as going away or shifting my focus from anything necessary to adult responsibility. Money had been paid and would be paid again to other people for my experiences, and I would do things and exert myself and think and be creative to find solutions, and my job was to understand as best I could but only so that I could transform that understanding into enhanced enjoyment of the world for as much of the world as possible, starting with my own mind. If I didn't shine, how could I expect others to respond in kind? To paraphrase Yossarian, I wasn't "running away from my responsibilities," I was running "to them."
Later I went out with friends and all of the basketball games were on TV. Just before my friend and I left my apartment to meet them, we saw online that Duke had been upset in the first round, a 3 seed losing to a 14 seed. That happens, but it's still a big deal. I was wearing a blue shirt, but the Blue Devils lost, so I figured I should change. I wasn't upset, and since Greg was from Maryland he tried to taunt a little, but he didn't care either. We didn't even go to either of those schools. I had visited the campus once, but that was it.
We discussed the topic later in the evening, because one of my friends loves Syracuse. He is from the town, and almost everyone he knows loves them, so it's really a social thing. I've seen him ecstatic when they won, and not really care when they lose. It seems like a perfect attitude to me. When I was younger I reacted in both extremes, and like anything I experienced, I'm happy they happened and I learned from them.
I rode the train home around 1 am, and when I got on there was a guy with a sports cap on. It had a yellow B on the head of a purple bird. It was for the Baltimore Ravens. I wrote about them last year, and how sports outcomes can be poetic, and how rooting for someone or some team to win is an innate enjoyable human past time regardless of our inability to affect the outcome. One of the most fun ways I have found to participate in reality is to let the world be what it will be, and I will improve upon the foundation it has laid down for me with the poetry I see. Whenever I see Ravens paraphernalia, I remember to be ravenous, hungry, determined and creative in pursuit of my dreams, and that poetry pervades more than it seems. That the world is a work of art. That we are all lucky to be here, and despite the poetry that seems to push and pull and direct the themes, we can still walk on the balance beams of our dreams.
I had to ride a new train and go a different route home because they were working on the 1 train. Instead of riding within a block of my apartment, I had a ten minute 1 am walk through Harlem ahead of me. When I switched at 34th, a guy in a Toronto Blue Jays hat sat diagonal from me. That same piece of writing about the Ravens ended with the Blue Jays triumphantly winning the World Series, proof enough for me that all I could see was divine poetry. You are welcome to read the piece. It's called "Play Ball!"
When I got home the moon was smiling high in the sky, and I looked at the results of the games again. It turns out the Blue Devils lost to Mercer, the underdogs who actually turned out to be excellent.
Their mascot: Bears
Hey Bear!
__________________________________________
Text Book Reading : "Make an Impact"
We finished the week learning about changing the world. The vocabulary words ranged from words that described motivated people who change the world to those who don't want to change anything. One such word was "escapist." The root is obviously "escape," but what is an escapist escaping from? The answer, supposedly, is reality. But what isn't part of reality? What makes reality so real, as opposed to whatever else you would call things you experience or perceive while participating in reality?
I write about these things here because there's no way I could get that deep during a class taught to mostly immigrants who are trying to learn the language. I explained to the class that escapist activities are anything you do that take you away from your reality. But what is one's reality? Isn't everything you experience technically your reality, even if it's vicarious? I guess we need to be more specific and say that escapism involves spending your time doing something that is not representative of the rest of your immediate reality that can be affected by your actions, and the majority of escapist activities involve no action on one's part. For example, watching sports, movies or any form of televised entertainment doesn't involve the viewer doing anything to affect the outcome of the experience. You can enjoy, dislike or scream in anger/ecstasy during those various experiences, but all because of something that had no real relationship to you. It doesn't even know you're here. Beyond that, there are escapist activities that can involve your participation, such as video games, role playing games with other people, and even travel, which is about as literally escapist as you can get.
The group basically agreed that everyone participates in escapism to some extent, and that sometimes it is even healthy and completely desirable. Anything beyond perceiving your direct surroundings and circumstances would technically be escapist. And so what if it is? Escapism can relieve tension, energize you, or give your mind enough of a break from the real issues you have to deal with so that you can be rested and return with better focus and determination. Although meditation supposedly involves going into inner realms of one's mind and spirit which sometimes feel realer than everything else, the truth is that it is inherently ignorant of immediate surroundings and involvement with the "outside world." But it's been shown to be very healthy, therapeutic and perhaps even spiritually cleansing to go inside yourself and meditate as a means of connecting with the larger world. And I think that's whole idea: connecting with the source of the larger world, which includes your source.
There is obviously the negative side of escapism... as with anything else. This occurs when your escapist activity removes you from reality to such an extent that you're not interested in the real world outside, or that you forget how to participate and enjoy the rest the world has to offer, which, at the top of the list, would probably be human interaction, and at the least, quiet contented contemplation of the wondrous world around you, at least at some point in your experience.
One of the examples of the many possible escapist activities we discussed at length in class was the emotional viewing of sporting activities. The key word is "emotional." Viewing anything can be fun, instructive, entertaining and shared with others. But with sports, you have absolutely 100% no control over the outcome. It is not the result of anything you have done or chosen to do or believe in your life. You can't do anything about it, and what's more, unlike politics or the weather or something happening to someone you love, it won't actually affect your life at all beyond the mental power you've already handed over. I say this as someone who spent much of his youth and teenage years worrying about games involving my favorite teams, yelling at the TV, standing in certain places and refusing to move when my team did well, and even screaming at players on my favored team because they weren't playing well enough. When they won, I was usually happy for a little while. When they lost, I felt like somehow I had lost, because I was rooting for them, and I was very mad. The few times a championship was earned, it felt great when it happened, and for the rest of the night, and maybe the next day at school, but then I noticed that nobody else liked my team except a few other people. It seemed more divisive than inclusive, which is probably when I realized that I was not as interested in choosing sides in competitive sports as I used to be. I still loved playing them, more than ever actually, and watching them as entertainment filled with amazing inspiring activity, intensity, and often welcomed suspense over the outcome. But nothing that could truly shake your appreciation of the rest of the world as it was at the time. Besides, soon, nobody was talking about your team winning it anymore. They were already speculating about next year.
The first team I loved and followed the entire season resulting in a championship was Duke basketball. It wasn't even the professional level, but something about the 64 team tournament, all of the upsets defying the numbered projections, predictions and statistics, the true heart of it all, the team efforts outshining the isolation ego displays so frequent once they get paid in the NBA, and the downright excellent excitement created by game after game that had the potential to and often did end with some last second buzzer-beating beautiful basket. The truth was I LOVED basketball, playing it every chance I got, even when it was winter and I had to wear gloves in the driveway and dribble on icy earth. And I loved the NCAA tournament, or March Madness as they called it. And I really loved it when my favorite chosen team, the Duke Blue Devils, won the 2001 NCAA tournament. I loved it even more because I had followed their every move since the preseason. In fact, I'd followed every team since the preseason (and there are many teams), so I felt like I knew the whole game everyone was playing. In fact, I won the tournament pool by picking the most correct victories, and got to watch my team triumph. Afterward I stopped caring so much. I still followed intensely my senior year, and was mad when Duke lost in the third round to Indiana, but was in reality much more angry about my recent break-up with my girlfriend. Duke losing was just another bitter blow when I was down. There were a few times in college when they got pretty far and played UConn, a team I have hated even before I liked Duke, but besides that I didn't pay much attention. In fact, I renounced being a Duke fan in 2007 because I'd read a Tom Wolfe book about a college closely modeled after Duke, and the basketball program depicted was not something I wanted to support. I picked them to lose in the first round for the first time since I was 11, and they did. I pretty much stopped paying attention after that. I think I secretly rooted for them in the tournament in the next two years, but didn't really watch many of the games. I was thinking about a lot of other things then.
A few years later I was in Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, waiting for another bus to Laos to come the next day because nobody had woken me up for my bus earlier that morning, despite my request for a wake-up call. So I wandered around and came back to the hotel to use the internet, and it turned out that there was one minute left in the championship game, Duke was playing an underdog named Butler, and it was tied. Basically Butler barely missed an amazing half-court shot at the buzzer, which would have won the game. When the shot was in the air I thought, "I can't really truly root against this team I used to love, and it would be pretty awesome if my favorite team in my favorite sport won the championship during my journey... but I can't root against the underdog either. And if the shot goes in...wow!" Of course, it didn't go in, and I enjoyed a Duke win. Then I went to Laos and pretty much stopped thinking about it. Although I think I wrote a web log with basketball metaphors a few weeks later, now that I think about it...
This sports obsession was an example of escapism without any positive consequences. I invested lots of emotional energy, heart health, well-being and irrefutable time hoping and praying and wishing and sitting on my butt while other people worked really hard to play a fun yet incredibly challenging and pressurized game, with opportunities ranging from supreme jubilation to utter embarrassment.
Meanwhile, traveling wasn't really escapism at all. I may not have been at a steady job, but I didn't have a steady job path in my life yet anyway. I'd been working, but always in something different, while consistently reading and usually writing. But I considered myself in more of a learning phase back then anyway. Once I felt like I had read, written and worked at uninspiring jobs enough, I began exploring the world with my fresh eyes, intrigued and endlessly curious about how other people lived their journeys and which prizes were possibilities. Their wondrous talents, passions, creations and loves filled me with energy and humility. I wanted to see, be and free the best I could. I never thought of it as going away or shifting my focus from anything necessary to adult responsibility. Money had been paid and would be paid again to other people for my experiences, and I would do things and exert myself and think and be creative to find solutions, and my job was to understand as best I could but only so that I could transform that understanding into enhanced enjoyment of the world for as much of the world as possible, starting with my own mind. If I didn't shine, how could I expect others to respond in kind? To paraphrase Yossarian, I wasn't "running away from my responsibilities," I was running "to them."
Later I went out with friends and all of the basketball games were on TV. Just before my friend and I left my apartment to meet them, we saw online that Duke had been upset in the first round, a 3 seed losing to a 14 seed. That happens, but it's still a big deal. I was wearing a blue shirt, but the Blue Devils lost, so I figured I should change. I wasn't upset, and since Greg was from Maryland he tried to taunt a little, but he didn't care either. We didn't even go to either of those schools. I had visited the campus once, but that was it.
We discussed the topic later in the evening, because one of my friends loves Syracuse. He is from the town, and almost everyone he knows loves them, so it's really a social thing. I've seen him ecstatic when they won, and not really care when they lose. It seems like a perfect attitude to me. When I was younger I reacted in both extremes, and like anything I experienced, I'm happy they happened and I learned from them.
I rode the train home around 1 am, and when I got on there was a guy with a sports cap on. It had a yellow B on the head of a purple bird. It was for the Baltimore Ravens. I wrote about them last year, and how sports outcomes can be poetic, and how rooting for someone or some team to win is an innate enjoyable human past time regardless of our inability to affect the outcome. One of the most fun ways I have found to participate in reality is to let the world be what it will be, and I will improve upon the foundation it has laid down for me with the poetry I see. Whenever I see Ravens paraphernalia, I remember to be ravenous, hungry, determined and creative in pursuit of my dreams, and that poetry pervades more than it seems. That the world is a work of art. That we are all lucky to be here, and despite the poetry that seems to push and pull and direct the themes, we can still walk on the balance beams of our dreams.
I had to ride a new train and go a different route home because they were working on the 1 train. Instead of riding within a block of my apartment, I had a ten minute 1 am walk through Harlem ahead of me. When I switched at 34th, a guy in a Toronto Blue Jays hat sat diagonal from me. That same piece of writing about the Ravens ended with the Blue Jays triumphantly winning the World Series, proof enough for me that all I could see was divine poetry. You are welcome to read the piece. It's called "Play Ball!"
When I got home the moon was smiling high in the sky, and I looked at the results of the games again. It turns out the Blue Devils lost to Mercer, the underdogs who actually turned out to be excellent.
Their mascot: Bears
Hey Bear!
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