Rantings

There was a time in my life when all I thought about was myself. Not that I knew it then. I'm not even sure I fully understand it now. I wasn't consciously self absorbed, but it was there. In the plain old fashion of speaking, I was thinking about someone else. Someone that didn't even exist. But I wanted it to exist so badly because I wanted it to be mine. We have these feelings as children, not quite in the full sense. When I was little, I wanted to be a mermaid. I knew it couldn't happen, but I wanted it to be true. I would go to the public pool with my best friend and swim with my feet stuck together just to see what it would feel like. Then, this imaginary character was implanted in my mind and I felt like the little girl at the pool all over again, taping my ankles together so I would have a tail.
There is some minute level of Godliness in all of this want. I once read that the reason we wanted imaginary things to be true is because in our minds, they are close in likeness to heaven. In our minds, heaven is a place like Narnia without Jadis, or Oz with out the Wicked Witch of the West. Heaven is a place where all our dreams come true. It is earth without poverty and ignorance and corruption. It is our shallow fantasy of a perfect place.
Charles Dickens said it best when he described ignorance. He described it as a scrawny little boy, with Want as a sister. He said to beware them both, but mostly the boy. Ignorance is part of the problem of humanity. We see things like poverty and hunger and AIDs, but turn the TV off because we dont want to think of it. We say it's because it is so horrible, that it makes us sad, but in truth, it is because we are scared little girls and boys hiding under our beds when our parents fight.
I'm not sure what made me think about all this. Maybe it's because i'm feeling philosophical. More likely because i'm reading Blue Like Jazz, and it's making me think about this sort of thing, which is something I don't normally like to do. Some of it scares me, some makes me angry, and some I just plain don't understand. I don't like not understanding. If I were a demigod, it would be my fatal flaw. Anyway, hope you don't mind my rantings. And maybe I got you thinking. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

~Lisa