Illusion - Dream - Construct

One of my favorite movies is Vanilla Sky. It's a weird and wild flick but the story is a stunner. In the end he finds out everything he ever did was an attempt to recreate pleasant situations, realities, and images that mirrored what had been impressed on his memory by family, society, religion, the media, and so on. There was no reality whatsoever except an often futile attempt to create a Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, Norman Rockwell reality in the present moment. If you aren't familiar with the TV shows, they depicted American life (literally) in a black and white, good and bad fashion, quite different from the often colorful, often gray areas we really encounter. Rockwell also painted American life as one of iconic themes and simplistic values. To me it's frightening to think I have no purpose but to further what I "should" think, feel, desire, and value from what was given to me in the past with almost no original thoughts or feelings whatsoever. Another way my reality gets turned upside down is to consider how other life forms see their reality. The life of a bee, a bird, a worm, or a tree must be completely different from ours. All of this urges me not to take our lives so seriously, it's simply one viewpoint of a great many. Clinging to my situation with a death grip is futile, things change, and not always to my liking. The point, the bottom line is to "Row, row, row, your boat, gently down the stream (of life), merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream."