Today is the last day of this miniseries on lessons from an
amusement park. I suspect that there
might be some out there who have read this week and considered that I may just
be turning into a grumpy old man. Trust
me, I’ve thought the same thing on more than one occasion over the last few
weeks. That’s a possibility and even
likely to be a genetic thing, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I came
across that way at all. But I do hope
that there has been some thought-provoking stuff over the last four days,
regardless of whether or not it was provoked by amusement parks.
So, on this last day of posts, I really tried to think about
the best takeaway that I could come up with from my amusement park musings,
ponderings, and insights. As I thought
about it, amusement parks and casinos have a lot of similarities. If you’ve ever been to a casino, you know
that you can pretty much go there any time of the day or night and find things
happening. In fact, I don’t know this
for a fact, but I would gather that it might be difficult to find a clock in
there. They act as a refuge from the
outside world, a shelter. Hey, other
than the obvious, why else would they come up with a slogan like, “What happens
in Vegas stays in Vegas?”
Amusement parks are similar in that they do their best to
shelter you from the outside world. They
offer countless distractions from reality.
Places like Disney even go out of their way to have a world behind the
scenes that prevents people from seeing where the trash goes and avoid two
Mickey Mouses showing up in the same place at the same time. Tell me that wouldn’t blow a kid’s mind.
But after all of the distractions, when the day is over,
there’s still reality waiting for you.
You always have to go back to that place again. Regardless of how many times or how long you
go to the “happiest place on earth,” you’re always going to have to face the
realities of life. I guess you could go
one of two ways with this as well. There
might be some people who say, well, what’s the point of distractions if you
eventually have to face the facts. I’m
not one of those people. We all need to
have some distractions in life, most of us call them hobbies, but in order to
maintain our sanity in an unstable world, these distractions are essential.
My oldest son has been in a place where he has asked whether
or not certain things are real or not.
He knows that everything that he sees is not real, especially on TV, and
so he will ask my wife and me whether something is real or not. A few weeks ago, when he saw the Olympics on
TV, he asked if they were real. While it
took me by surprise at first, it made sense considering that he saw them on
TV. When we were at Busch Gardens, he
had a pretty healthy understanding that the things that he saw and experienced
were not reality, but it didn’t prevent him from having fun, and to me, that’s
the key.
There are distractions and then there are escapes. Distractions have a way of clearing our heads,
helping us to reconnect to a situation with new perspectives and insights. Escapes are simply means of avoiding the
inevitable. The two words may be used
more interchangeably than they should be, but I do see a clear distinction
between them. Distractions can help us
to find joy and excitement outside of the mundane or difficult circumstances
that we might regularly face. Escapes
simply attempt to stay away from those circumstances for as long as possible.
Amusement parks to just what they say, they amuse us. At least, for the price tag, I hope they do. And that’s a good thing. But the minute that we find ourselves
escaping to our own little private “amusement parks” on a regular basis, we
need to do a health check and find out what the deeper issue is. A week away from internet, Facebook, work,
and cable was a good thing to remind me of that. We all need to unplug and remember the things
in life that are important to us. It
might not last long, but how long it lasts shouldn’t matter as much as what we
do with the time that we allot for it.
A few years ago, I was getting into a rhythm of taking a day
a month to have a spiritual retreat day.
Sometimes I would just go to a local park, other times I drove a
distance to a lake house owned by some people in my church. If I spent my time wisely, it was
life-giving, a time of recharge in which I would gain new perspective and be
ready to face new challenges when I got back to reality again. That’s what distractions can provide for us,
but hopefully they are guided distractions.
Sometimes mine are, and sometimes they aren’t. I need to get better at it, but I’m still
learning and growing.
Someday, I’m going to get back to the “happiest place on
earth” again. It will be a fun
distraction from the realities of life, but I hope that when I come back to the
ground of reality, I will be a little more calm, a little more relaxed, and a
little more ready to face the things before me.
Everybody needs a little time away!
No comments:
Post a Comment