VELVETEEN RABBIT

No, this is NOT one of my favorite movies, it is however a favorite Metaphor for life. If you are observant, and one should be lest one get run over etc., you can take an itsy bitsy out of body trip from time to time to watch yourself and how you relate or at times don't relate to those around you. And most important of all, how you can become invisible or "not-real" sort of the opposite of what happened to the Velveteen Rabbit. Don't tell me you don't remember that story. Rabbits are important in literature, take Alice in Wonderland, any story by John Updike and of course "Of Mice and Men." But I refer to Velveteen because in that story, as a result of the love and attention of a little child, this stuffed rabbit goes from a flattened mass of alopecia into a living being.

The opposite can happen as well. Because of the artificial importance we give to other things in life, gifts, work, social obligations, and the like, we can ignore those humans that are near and dear to us, take them for granted, and over time, they become un-real, inanimate, and are relegated to the pile of junk in the great toy-box of life buried among mismatched puzzle pieces and random legos. Making something real again is a more difficult process. All it takes to make someone un-real is to ignore them long enough, take them for granted, assume they are OK, and "fritter away the day in detail about all those important things that have to get done." Eventually, like a houseplant left at home while you go away on vacation, you come back to a leafless stick. Ever try to resuscitate a leafless stick? See what I mean?

Going back to my not-favorite movie, in the film, The Bruce Willis character is omnipresent. He contributes and is "there" and communicates with a young man. You don't learn until later in the film that Bruce is dead, which finally explains why nobody but this young man who can "See dead people" hears or acknowledges anything he says. So, go back to that out-of-body observation point where you can look down from above, as has been reported in people who have cardiac arrest and are then revived, and see how people really relate to you and you to them. Are you invisible in your own home, office, on the street? Are others invisible to you? Is this whole thing a Quantum Physics conundrum in which none of us is real and all of existence is a cloud of energy? Hmmm? To be or not to be, that is the question.