Award-winning actor Robin Williams was found dead in his northern California home on Monday, suspected of taking his own life. Robin Williams made his living by making us laugh. But while he was laughing on the outside with us, he was crying on the inside alone and depressed.
Imagination is a double-edged sword. It can help us escape reality to the point of getting lost. Like a child playing in the woods, we become distracted by our created fantisy and loose track of time and space. Suddenly we are deep in the woods and cannot find our way back to safety.
How can you find your way out of the woods when you cannot see the forest for the trees? We all need a life-line to grab when reality makes us realize that we are lost.
A life-line will not keep you from getting lost in fantasy, pain or depression, but it will keep you from getting hopelessly lost.
After all, life is a journey. You seldom know where you are going or how you will get there until you start to look back at where you have been and how far you have traveled. For some of us much of the way may feel uphill. The silver lining to that dark cloud is that eventually, the path will lead downhill. What goes up must come down; the Law of Gravity and life on earth.
Just as cave divers use lifelines of fishing filament to find their way out of dark caves and back to safety, our relationships can be our lifelines back to reality.
Here are 5 lifelines called the 5 Fs that may save you.
- Faith- what is your belief system? Remember it. Re-embrace it.
- Face your challenges. Don’t run from them. They will follow you.
- Focus on the silver lining in the dark cloud. It will help you see the out.
- Family-reach out.
- Friends- reconnect.
Alone, these lifelines can guide you out of the darkness of the moment. When tied together, they become a strong rope that can pull you to safety.
Grief is a painful form of love, and pain is reality. To be in pain is human. To suffer is a choice. Anything that deadens pain becomes a pleasure. Painkilling pharmaceuticals deaden physical pain. Role playing is a psychological treatment that can control or deaden emotional pain. When used to excess, either can become addicting. When combined to excess, the double edged sword of imagine becomes a guillotine.
The unrealistic excitement of controlling our world from behind the safe and predictable mask of Pretend-Land can make returning to reality and unscripted challenges an almost impossible fearful, painful, feat. We prefer to stay in the safety of our waking lucid dream-world of role-playing where we know we are dreaming but realize that we can change the endings and temporarily control the nightmare. The optimum word here is temporarily.
Reality always wins over fantasy.
The dream becomes reality and reality becomes the nightmare. Like anything else in life, a perfect dream-state can become addicting.
Was Robin William’s death his desperate attempt at a final awakening?
Robin Williams, we show our love for you with grief. May you rest in peace in the angelic arms of your fellow comedians, Richard Jeni, Chris Farley, and John Belushi, the man you called your “wake-up call.”
