Everyday Canvas

Reality and Broken Heart

For "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" 

Prompt: Ray Bradbury advises in Zen in the Art of Writing, “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
If reality is so bad and destructive, which I agree that it can be at times, why are we seeking it under the guise of believability factor in the books we read and the movies we watch? What is your opinion on the matter?

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I am not sure I would want to shun reality altogether, as writing only reflects reality. Even with the fantasy genre or with any other genre, we want to relate to the characters and other elements of what we write about.

Reality and relating. They sound similar, don’t they, with some of the letters in them being the same? This is because we warm up to things that we know of and that we have experienced.

What is reality, we have to ask, then. Reality is simply what it is, which we may think rightly or wrongly.

We may experience what we call “reality” in our specific ways and perceive it through our five senses and filter it through our thoughts, feelings, and other sensations. In this way, we relate to it. Sometimes, our perceptions become too heavy, too sad, too destructive to handle. Still, don’t we refer to or reflect them in our writing?

This may be why the most prolific writers are reality-oriented as they get “drunk” on writing. I suspect, not because they want to escape reality but because they want to find it. After all, despite what we think we experience as reality, to really search and find that unchangeable yet mysterious being has to be a lot of work.

For: "Space Blog" 
Prompt: From Raven ’s "We Minus You Equals A Lonely Broken Me" 
“Have you ever had a broken heart?”

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Who hasn’t? One has a broken heart because of a loss. It could be any loss that feels a part of you, a country, a goal, a parent, a sibling, a lover, a partner, a friend, a pet, etc.

Did I ever have a broken heart? Definitely! Anytime I say goodbye to a loved one for good, my heart shatters.

In our culture, a broken heart usually refers to a lost lover. Yes, that too did happen to me, very recently, too. I lost my husband and best friend of fifty-four years. Yet, I try to cope with it since there is no other alternative and because I appreciate all those good years, and I am immensely thankful that I had them. With that, I have been one of the few lucky ones. Especially because I am aware of the big-picture perspective of my life in its entirety, that is a huge consolation.