choose reality

from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, by Donald Miller

"I live in fantasies. I live terrific lives in my head. It's part of the creative imagination, to daydream, to invent stories.

When I was young, I used to watch this cartoon show about a kid who got lost in daydreams. ... I think I grew up to be that kid. ... I didn't know getting lost in daydreams was odd until a couple of years ago when I asked an old girlfriend what she daydreamed about. She answered, 'Nothing.' How does a person daydream about nothing? I wondered. But she explained she lived in the now and worked with whatever was really happening.

But last year I was sitting in a café in Boston when a man came in with his wife and their two children. One of the children was a boy who looked to be three, and the other was an infant dressed in pink. I went back to reading, but after a time the infant began to cry in a shrill I would normally find annoying. But it didn't affect me the same way this time. I watched the mother lift the baby into her lap and comfort her until the child's sobbing turned to gasping. As the mother brought the child to her shoulder and rocked her until gasping turned back to breathing. It hit me then that while I had spent my twenties daydreaming and avoiding the reality of crying children, this man I didn't know had met a woman and started a real family with real children who were not literary inventions, but actual characters who cried in coffee shops. This sort of life once sounded boring to me. It was too real, too unromantic, I suppose. But there in Boston it occurred to me that his story was better than mine for the simple fact that his story was actually happening. He was doing real things with real people while I'd been typing words into a computer."