When we become adults we let go of childish things. I’m not talking about becoming an adult thereby giving up the things you love and enjoy and even cherish. I would lose my Geek Card if I even intimated that. So I’m not….gorramit! What I’m talking about are the stories we make up to fill in the blanks about the world we haven’t figured out yet. Like the monster in the closet which fills in why we’re scared of the dark as well as why noises seem to have no cause and shapes become distorted with diffuse light sources, etc, etc. As we learn the reality behind those things we let go of the childish stories and the fears. We may remember them. We may even try to reclaim them through stories and movies and music and haunted houses and on and on…but you can’t go home again. Too many cliché’s. I’ll move on.
What we don’t realize is that we still use that ability, that skill of filling in the blanks, to navigate our lives. Adult lives include responsibilities and capabilities so the stories we create reflect this by being much more practical while at the same time being just as fantastical. Someone(s) does something that negatively impacts us and we don’t know why so we make up their motivation to fill in the gaps. We have a vague feeling that something bad will happen if we head in a certain direction, so we make up what that bad thing will be and exactly how it will come to pass and act to avoid it. We basically invent adult versions of the boogeyman and then, just as we did when we were little, we act as if it’s real while living in fear of something which doesn’t exist.
It’s like in the Matrix where the Oracle tell’s Neo not to worry about the vase. Then he bumps it and it breaks. She turns to him and says “What’s really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn’t said anything?” How many times in our lives would we have made different choices if we weren’t assuming that the boogeyman in our lives was real? If we didn’t live in fear of a layoff that never comes, of a life change that never happens, of a relationship problem that doesn’t really exist? How would our life been different if we weren’t worried about things that aren’t real and haven’t happened yet? How many negative things that happened to us came to be because we believed so whole heartedly in them that we made them come true? What if we stopped believing in the boogeyman and started living without fear? Wouldn’t that just bake your noodle?
