One Big Act

“He wondered if they felt any of what he felt.
What if everyone were playing the same part?
What if each and every inmate in this asylum was concealing the same doubts, none of them talking because they all felt utterly and completely alone?” – First Shift

We are all of us, I think, pretending to one extent or another.

No matter what I do, some part of it feels like pretence, the uncertain parts for sure, and a part of me is always uncertain.

The laughter at the joke, the smile to a friend, was that pretence?
Something else…

Real at the time, as real as anythng is real in the moment.
Now in reflection, in hidsight, when we come home, at the end of the day, alone, the tears come, and the past remembered moment changes, it was all pretence.

Sad if we alow some sense of pretence to be a couse of our distress.
And I wonder if its not the sense of pretence that createes the sorrow but that only in the moment when we are alone and unable to share the expearnce that it becomes unreal.

– They can see it, you know. You can’t go on just pretending.
– Just pretending? You brought pretending into this family, James. You showed us we can change things by simply believing them to be different.
– A lot of things, Sylvia. Not everything.
– But the things that matter. We’ve pretended for some time now that you’re a part of this family, haven’t we? You’ve come to mean so much to us all that now, it doesn’t matter if it’s true. And even if it isn’t true, even if that can never be… I need to go on pretending… until the end… with you.
Finding Neverland

The things that matter…

We create much of the world we see… see the world we expect to see.
So pretend on, open the doors to other vistas and one day, just maybe we may find ourselves walking through the doors… and if not at least admire the view.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
‘Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Edwin Arlington Robinson