Hunger For Shared Reality

As much as I want to define my own reality, I have an equal desire to enjoy shared reality with people around me. And I don't mean the forced sharing that takes place with family and co-workers, the sharing that we assume will happen in a day. I mean the real intimacy of sharing myself and being accepted and understood by another, and accepting and understanding another.

In recent years, we have come to identify the "male bonding" experiences of watching sports (and drinking beer). Women have their own experiences, mostly shoe shopping and taking a bathroom break with your posse. Oh yes, and those endless telephone conversations. While those experiences are nice and typify shared reality, I really hunger at times for people who can share my experiences of reality and shifts in the assemblage point. I suppose that is the real reason why I'm writing this blog, other than the fact that writing reveals more of myself to me than any other process I've found. At least with this blog, there is the opportunity for shared reality. Maybe no one reads this at all, or maybe there are many lurkers out there. From the act of writing, I create a space for myself that takes the edge off my hunger.

For much of my life, I wanted to share my experiences as a way to validate them, to allow them to be real for me. It was a big shift when I started having experiences and thoughts that I just wanted to keep for myself. It was evidence that my journey had shifted inward, and was the beginning of some real depth in my character. Until that point, I could only hold one emotion at a time, and I expressed everything I felt as I felt it. Until then, I could never be angry with someone and smile at them in a moment. That kind of depth was beyond me, and seemed more like duplicity. I don't think of it as duplicity today. I understand today that there are many currents of emotions that run through me at every second, and I am choosing which stream to connect with, much like an old fashioned telephone operator chooses where to plug in a phone line to make a connection. I encounter people in my working world who I realize have not yet expanded beyond this sort of one dimensional reality, and it helps me to have appropriate expectations for them and conduct effective communication with them. One thing I have learned, still waters don't always run deep. Quiet people are not always thoughtful people. In fact, I've been shocked to discover the things that some quiet people have been thinking, especially since I had assumed they had depth.

I remember when I was finishing up college and doing my student teaching, I felt a strong wave of this hunger. I was working for the first time in a professional environment. My new life experiences were amazing to me, and I felt very much alive. I shared that reality with the other teachers and my students, so I didn't really have a need to talk about my day with my friends and close friends. However, I remember feeling that there was a slice of my life that wasn't shared. I wanted to share my experience of driving in to work each day. I still remember moments of those drives, in the middle of winter before the sun had begun to rise, driving through the countryside to the next town. Isolated homes light up the landscape as light flooded out their windows to their yards, providing beacons of warmth and connection I passed on my long drive. On those mostly cloudy mornings, I would watch the first traces of sunlight begin to illuminate the edge of the horizon, and only begin to see the light after I arrived inside my school building. It was a magical hour to be traveling, and it was that magic I wanted so desperately to share with someone, anyone.

In recent years, I have wanted to share some of my more mystical experiences of life with anyone who can appreciate my view of the world. I have an ongoing hunger to this kind of connection. It has caused me to invite people to hang out in my world that I would not otherwise have kept around me, and the lack of real compatibility did eventually untie the bond between us. There are moments when I feel this hunger strong and I fight against the overwhelming need to share, preventing me from making myself into a fool by sharing with someone who can't understand what I'm about. It's been a curious process.

It seems that no one wants to really have a unique reality. We all want to share overlapping reality with the people we love and trust. Perhaps that is why we love and trust them, because they overlap our reality.

I woke up from a dream last week where I was calling off an engagement. It seems that the relationship was a long one, and marriage was the next logical step. Right before the big day, my guy asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this. I suspect that he was really looking for a confirmation of my feelings for him. To his surprise, and to my own, instead I realized that marrying him would not be horrible, but it was not what my heart really wanted. So I called it off, and without any regrets or emotional suffering from the shift. Just a realization and boom! A decision that caused a major change in direction. No big deal. This dream left me with a lingering feeling, that I want to live the life of my heart's desire, not continue along the in the same direction just because things are lining up before me. How appropriate for the challenges I face in my life today!

I don't want to love people just because they share my reality. I want to love people because my heart floods when I'm around them. I want people in my life that allow us to create our own reality instead of so much adjusting to fit into each other's realities. This is what I want.

Free To Be Media Free

For years, I railed against the media. I went on "music fasts" where I didn't listen to the radio or any broadcast music. I stopped watching the news, and then I stopped watching TV. I stopped reading the papers. I even stopped seeing movies.

For a while, I felt the entire concept of reporting the news was jilted. People can't hear the news without having an emotional reaction. And what possible action could I take to help a famine in Africa, or a flood in the next state, or the murder of children at a school on the opposite coast? I felt that my emotions were being toyed with. I felt that my life had enough events that happened to me and to people I know that needed my emotional reaction. I didn't need to be borrowing events from around the world that happened to people totally unknown to me.

I did all of these things because I felt that it was important for me to know my own mind. That I needed to make up my own mind based on my own, personal experiences of life. I wanted to eliminate all of the vicarious living that takes place as we watch series TV and movies. I wanted my memory full of the experience that happened naturally in my own life, and that rippled into my life from the people I interact with. I felt that by staging group experiences, the media was programming us for future responses to similar events. I never put much into conspiracy theories, I didn't feel some evil group was behind this, or that Satan was behind this as some of my religious friends believe. I just wanted to be my own person, to think my own thoughts, and have my own experiences.

I eventually started to watch movies again, but it took a long time before I would listen to the radio. I stayed off of TV for almost 20 years, and have just returned to it within the last year. Occasionally, I will pick up a newspaper. I missed Murphy Brown, Seinfeld, Star Trek, "must see TV," the O.J. trial, most of the music and many of the movies that defined segments of time. I would never do well on those trivial game shows that assume you have been observing the world around you. But what I gained is a sense of my own thoughts, the pattern of my own thinking, and a comfortable sense of being at home within silence. I gained a sense of my own integrity.

It's not that I think TV or radio or movies or news are evil or that they are deliberately created to lead people by the nose. Many of the artists involved with these endeavors are true seekers who are exploring the world and want to share that exploration with an audience. I have a great respect for the people who develop these messages. Even the marketing and advertising folks have my respect for their clever ways to draw attention from an audience that is somewhat jaded by past experiences. Today, I limit my involvement to these things mostly because of my time priorities. I have many things I want to do, and being a couch potato eats away at my productive time, the time that makes my life feel juicy. I have seen most of the X-Files in reruns, and I have upgraded to a DVD player, so don't think that I've passed over these things as unimportant or meaningless.

I feel like I've found a good balance for my life right now.

And yet, I still marvel at how the collective consciousness is filled with media images, situation comedy characters, breaking news images like the firefighter carrying the child out of the Federal Building in OK City, or the school yard in Columbine with scattered children. New media images, new TV shows and new movies have a wealth of experiences to build up, to refer to, and to lampoon in the future. And I lack most of these common experiences of the last twenty years. My perception of the world has not been influenced by them. I truly live in my own world, a world that has less overlap with the collective than people who are tuned in to the media.

I'm not sure what I think about this, I just recognize that it is true.