What is 'Real?'

Walking along with the puppies (now almost dogs), picking blackberries on another dusty graveled road. It seems much of the summers of my childhood were spent this way, the locusts see-sawing in the heat, the humidity about a hundred, the temperature just shy of that and me popping delectable berries into my mouth only a little worried about the small bug I might have eaten with it and whether something taller than my dog might have peed on it. But, I figured, I’m immune anyway with all the stuff I’ve consumed over the years. Then I thought about people who needed the wild food to survive and it struck me that when people talk about a thing being ‘real,’ they mean when there is no alternative.

Stated another way. Cowboys didn’t necessarily choose to be rough, dirty, and broken down. The men (and women) adapted themselves to the reality they faced. That is what we mean when talk about being real. When the choices are limited by circumstances you can’t control – a miserable childhood in the East End of London during the Great Depression, a starving woman in Bangladesh, Paris during the Revolution, the multiple small tragedies of wars. Many first and second world people feel we aren’t real. We don’t risk our lives, we don’t feel genuine. But real is what happens when you run out of options.

We have, put it another way, options that a poor man in Indonesia with a wife and kids, doesn’t have. We are tourists in their life because, no matter what, we can run back home to the safety of the American border. We can hide behind our trust funds or our retirement funds or our insurance. We are padded and coddled. And we feel we aren’t adults, we aren’t real. This invalidity is because of too many choices. When you get up to ride a wild horse at a dude ranch to play cowboy, you have the choice of getting off the horse and walking away. You didn’t spend a day catching the cussed thing to add to your meager stable. Now you have a horse you have to feed through the winter and, with luck, tame before spring roundup. You, as the tourist might get hurt, but you have the choice of walking away. You don’t have a need for the horse.

Gardening is fun, when your very life doesn’t depend on it. You can always hand off the overabundant squash to a friend, but if that were all you had through the winter, you’d find ways to cook it and scrounge like hell for other food. Hunting now is mostly play, but it was a matter of feeding the family not much more than three generations ago.

When we talk about BDSM people being real, many of us who use it to spice our lives have chosen to have it in our lives, but it is not absolutely necessary that we have it daily. For some it is the center and the be all. They have given up many things – family ties, marriages, jobs, bank accounts, to follow their dream of being someone’s slave, or to be full-on leather all the time with apologies toward none. They have rolled the dice and all they have is placed on that one bet. So those people sneer at the amateurs. They have no choices (by their own choice or psychological makeup) they have systematically followed their dream down the rabbit hole and the options are limited. You have to respect a person who bets it all on one roll. You respect them, but I am too much of a hedger.

I am a hedger; maybe life teaches you that, teaches you to play a little less wildly because you have more to lose or because you have lost so much that you are afraid to go forward, afraid to lose what took so long to gain. I have been in that mode for most of the last 5-7 years. I used to be more open and more generous. But I am hoping that this spring and summer, which have felt like such a relief after the dark years preceding them, will continue into the fall and that I will spend my fall flying, a priority. That I will look for opportunities to expand my life, that I will be willing to bet a little more.