My Silver Key

"Calm, lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence."

I could take it in a million directions, the line for which I made the mad dash to the drawer across the room in search of a suitable highlighter. Sometimes I feel like I am watching the world throw away the things I think it should hold most valuable. At other times, I know that the general concept of "the world" isn't real in itself, but I still get smacked in the face by friends I have lost to the pervading ennui.

The point of the story, or one of the many, rather, is that our division between what is real and what is not real is an arbitrary one, for all images--those within our heads and without--are filtered by the same human vessel. Our perception of the world of dreams and imagination is just as valid as our perception of what we consider to be the real world. But people lose this. They grow up and leave behind the key to their dreams, and they realize what a shitty place reality has come to be. But the problem is that their dream worlds have wasted away from lack of use by the time that they even realize this, so neither world contains anything useful for them. I vow to fight against becoming such an empty shell.

It's not about figuring out which things matter and which things don't. An old teacher of mine used to say that perception is more important than reality, and he mentioned this in reference to the start of various international conflicts, commenting that both sides will believe themselves to be in the right. There is never going to be a sole reality, and maybe that itself is the unifying factor of reality, however we choose to define it in the first place.

So...I decide what my reality is going to be, and I decide what matters and what does not, simply by choosing to believe in this or that, choosing to acknowledge this or that, etc. We are all designed to create our own version of the "meaning of life".