Reality vs delusions

Listening to a book on CD, as I do most times in the car, today a sentence made me stop, rewind and listen again and then turn the story off.  The sentence made such sense and I had to think about it for several miles. "It's only before the realities set in that we can treasure our delusions."

That this applies to everything was what made me turn off the sound and ponder.  We think we will win the lottery (delusional) and thus we allocate all those winnings to various good causes and charities and a trip to France until we see the winning numbers (reality) and sigh.  We are convinced the jeans we buy will fit in two weeks because of the diet we are now going to undertake (delusional) until those two weeks go by and those jeans are even snugger than they were in the dressing room (reality.) We promise that we will be nicer and more tolerant with our co-workers (delusional) until we sit at the desk and fix all the errors and clean up the messes they made while we were gone for one frigging day (reality.)

But it is nice to think, for those few moments or hours or days, that life will be what our delusions can promise us.  I suppose it is part of the human condition to have those illusions/delusions.  Joan Didion, one of my favorite writers, wrote "We tell our selves stories in order to live. .... We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices."  The delusion versus reality is more of the same.  It's a story until it isn't, until reality arrives.  We can choose option A, B, C, D of the multiple choices but the reality can be none of the above.  The stories we tell ourselves are just that until reality bites us in the ass.

All this is relative to not much, just a line from a novel by Anna Quindlen today in the car.  A good line, food for thought.  Or, as another writer has so aptly put it, food for the thoughtless.  

Thanks for reading and thanks for waiting for more than a week. I did write more often a few weeks ago and I will do it again.  Oh, wait!  Maybe that's more delusion/reality butting heads. 

I hope not.

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