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We all grow up knowing about fairy tales...childhood stories, sometimes morality tales or cautionary folktales, usually (in the modern era, anyway) sanitized a bit, so as not to terrify impressionable kids. Because dang, some of them are seriously freaky!
We hear or read these stories of journeys, challenges, or adventures; of encounters with amazing individuals or fantastic creatures; of difficult choices, tricks, or tests. They draw on vastly different cultural traditions and belief systems, and may be extremely simple or multi-layered and complex..but most of them share a common element: the protagonist usually triumphs in the end and everyone (except for the vanquished villains) live Happily Ever After, more or less.
Seems pretty sweet, right? Do the thing (whatever it is) in just the right way and you are rewarded by a perfect, and perfectly happy existence forever more. (And, if Walt Disney has anything to say about it, you will also be surrounded by charming little woodland creatures who will be some kind of improbable combination of wisecracking companion and housekeeper.) "If only [whatever] happens, everything will fall into place and life will be great!"
Whoa there, Cinderella (or Cinderfella)---not so fast. There's a BIG difference between fairy tales and real life. And many of us get hung up on that disconnect between a mindset, forged in childhood, that leaves us expecting the "happily ever after" part when we make a life change or accomplish something difficult, and the more complicated reality most of us end up with in real life.
Readers of a certain age will remember Rocky & Bullwinkle from back in the day. The knee-slapping, Cold War-informed animated adventures of Moose & Squirrel were punctuated by shorter cartoons...time-traveling adventures with Sherman & Peabody, the thrilling adventures of Canadian Mountie Dudley Do-Right (and his much smarter horse and girlfriend), and something called Fractured Fairy Tales. In these, the fairy tale genre was kind of shaken up and set back in place slightly askew. Few lessons were learned. The outcome was neither predictable nor aspirational. They were kind of uneven, actually; some were funny, some not so much. You know: kind of like real life.
Look, change is a good thing, but it's also hard, and messy, and maddeningly unpredictable, rarely turning out exactly as planned. Things don't work out precisely the way you expect. Things go wrong. Or they go right, but that causes other things to go wrong. About the only thing you can be sure of is that the "Happily Ever After" perfect existence thing is probably NOT going to be the ultimate outcome.
Sure, things will be better---maybe even a lot better. It may be different in ways that impact other aspects of our lives in ways we never saw coming, or didn't even dare hope for. But we do ourselves a disservice expecting our lives to be suddenly perfect in all ways, if we just change this one thing about it. That's really not how things shake out, most of the time. And that's okay. From little beans, mighty beanstalks grow.
Who's Your Li'l Buddy?
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