Disillusionment needs to be thrown out of the window. Toss it out. What is the point of being disillusioned? Being disillusioned means admitting that you are a victim of life. No one wants to be a victim of life. Life plays hard with everybody, alike. Do not imagine that your woes are worse than another’s – I can guarantee you they are not. You are not here to count your woes, in any case. You are here to count your blessings. Your woes can keep count of themselves, believe me. Let them. In fact – let your woes, go. Who says you cannot? Where they go is not your business. Good riddance. Why can you not just cut them loose? Because you count on your woes to keep you in your comfort zone. What is more familiar – and cozy – than a place so tried and tested that we know exactly how it goes? We all know how our heads go when we let ourselves dwell on our woes. We must watch woes with a cautious eye, they are often more illusory than they are, real. Pull yourself free of your illusion – see the world for what it is without passing judgement and decide to have an impact on its destiny.
If you should deliberately disillusion children for a living, stop it. Let them believe in the tooth fairy or the tooth mouse, Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny and superheroes, if they choose to. Let them have imaginary friends. It does not mean they are psychotic. Their realities are as much a construct as yours are – make space in your reality for the reality of your child. It will have developed independent of you and it needs space to grow. As a parent, you must respect your child’s internal reality and you must know that what you choose to show your child of this life will tell in its understanding of its external reality. As the guide – the role-model – you are in charge of demonstrating what life is, and what it does. You are responsible for giving your child the beginnings of an imagination, too. How you choose to do that is up to you. If you are absent when it comes to your child building a world inside of its head – if you show your child nothing that it finds worthwhile – then you are not giving the child anything to use as a foundation for its build. If you fail to provide a base for your child’s early belief systems then it can safely be said that as a parent you are being negligent. Negligent parents are not what this world needs.
Should you subscribe to the theory that life is an illusion – or that we live our illusions – then you will understand that disillusionment is absolutely pointless. How can you be disillusioned when you have chosen your own path? When you do not take the beaten track you can make no comparisons. Nothing is as it was before. What you see is what you get, and that is what you work with. You run the risk of feeling at a loss now and again – that is natural in a greedy world filled with takers – but you should not allow that feeling to take hold. It is an occupational hazard. Disillusionment at the hands of an illusion saps strength. The strength you need to live an illusion (because you will live your illusion in conjunction with your other realities) comes from knowing that you can. You can manage your illusion with some precision. Illusions are where we keep our best, because in an illusion your best is untouchable. If you cannot conceive of having a ‘best’ then you are on the wrong path. Get off it. Look around. Go where no one has gone before. Go to the unknown. It is a place in you. It is most likely that you will find yourself best on this path, in that place. Get busy interpreting and living your dreams – share your inner reality, even if it is only with yourself. If you want to find a way to make it real, you will.
C.J. Birch
C.J. Birch 