Keep coming back to the last part of the play "Our Town," the horror and incredulity of the girl that people have no idea of what's going on.
I'm no stranger to shutting out. I shut down when I traveled East. Culture shock, feeling judged, fish out of water…definitely shrank a little bit. I found a group that was cool with hugs. That helped more than you could imagine. I'm naturally a huggy person. Surprised? Here's the other thing: incredibly sensitive. To the point that I've wondered what the hell is wrong with me. Goes well with my Myers-Briggs personality type…but given that it's the rarest of personality types, it's no surprise that the rest of the world would not feel compelled to accommodate the way I see the world. I don't expect it to. But man, it gets lonely, and it's hard to stay true to that identity when the world screams, "NO" at worst and "uh…wha?" at best. So it's easy to shut out. Because paralysis seems the other option. Being overwhelmed and unable to function. Let a little of life in and it all floods wondrously and horribly and overwhelmingly and how can you do anything?
But…how can you not? How can you not stop and just consider everything that's happening every nanosecond? The life that grows, the weather patterns shifting, the split-second thoughts and decisions and habits and evasions and attractions and daydreams and everything in the scope of human interaction? How can you not see the pure miracle of continuing to exist, and how can it not stop you dead in your tracks? How can you not consider the cosmos that twirls and glimmers, of the everything that's happening?
And how can you not be aware of what could be? Of what you could be? If you had the audacity to breathe? To fearlessly live into who you were called to be in spite of the things that stand in your way?
Because cognizance of it leads to being responsible for it, for being accountable to living into it. But what if we lived in a world that encouraged that? that called us out when we don't do that?
Jump headlong down the rabbit hole.
