Real Life

Time passes so fast.  The days blend together.  What happened to March?  I am now fully entrenched into the Ixil lifestyle.  My life here feels normal to me and so I forget to write about it, like other people won't find it interesting.  For me, this is my "real life."  But the truth is, my life and my normal experiences here are very different than the lives of most of the people who read my blog.  So it is important that I share because even the things I now find uninteresting, other people may find fascinating.  

What is "real life" anyway?  When people return from vacation or from a short term mission experience, they say it's time to go back to "real life" or the "real world" as if everything they experienced was not reality.  Real life is more than the box we make it in our minds.  There are over 7 billion people on this planet encompassing thousands if not hundreds of thousands of different cultural groups.  Real life is fascinating, it is diverse.  Don't make the mistake of thinking your version of reality is the only one or the most important.  It is demeaning to billions of people whose lives are very different from yours.  The lives of the people I am working and living with here are just as real as yours.  

I know we all know this intellectually and I don't mean to get on a soap box, but I feel like sometimes we all get so wrapped up in our own worlds (me included) that we forget that other people and other cultures have just as equal worth as our own.  When we hear of great atrocities in other parts of the world, maybe it's easy to ignore because we don't see it as "real life."  We forget that those lives are just as important as our own.  We are stuck in our own boxes, far removed from the greater reality.

I am reminded of one of Plato's writings about the people who are raised and live all their lives chained in a cave, watching shadows flicker across a wall.  One escapes and sees the sun for the first time.  At first he is blinded but once his eyes adjust, he takes in the true reality all around him.  In some ways I think all of us are like the people raised in the cave.  We are raised with our own "realities" and sometimes we need to escape from our bubbles to discover the greater reality.  Then we realize that our lives in our little caves are only one tiny, tiny piece to a far, far greater reality beyond anything we could imagine.