A tip for surviving our current dystopia
Today, I’m not going to deal the increasingly dystopian world we live in.
Instead, I believe I will escape to wondrous worlds created by others and maybe even create one of my own. I have never even considered world building. World building seems to be an extravagant exercise done by those who have greater sense of the troubles of this world or who maybe have absolutely no knowledge of the world we live in.
Two extremes. I have those.
Perhaps I know too much and that is why I am depressed, or perhaps I do not know enough and that is why I have no hope.
Or maybe I just feel as though the world we presently live in is not a real one but one that is on the precipice of dystopia simply because it’s just a bad dream. It’s not even my bad dream. It’s someone else’s bad dream.
Can we actively exist in someone else’s dream?
I wonder. I am not the first to wonder this, I’m sure. (File this under “stuff I don’t know”).
Here is the TIP: in order to survive any traumatic event- whether acute or prolonged- one must mentally escape it as soon and as much as possible.
This escape can come in the form or writing, singing, painting, running, swimming, gardening, playing chess, solitaire, watching a movie we have already seen 1,000 times or any other activity that allows our mind to not engage in the dreadful world that is right in front of us.
BUT……the escape is temporary.
As tempting and easy as crawling under a blanket with our books or computer or iPad may be, we must use mental escapes only as breathers.
Time outs. Breaks.
We need them now more than ever.
I do not advocate chemically-induced mental escapes. (I also don’t judge those who use them, but I find they’re generally not useful and rarely yield positive results.)
In short, as our society continuously takes steps backwards and our future seems bleak, we must all take some time to escape it all, catch our breath and come back. Always come back.
“Everything will be Ok in the end. If it’s not ok, it’s not the end”
-John Lennon
