Fairy tales
Stories that involve some fanciful epic hero who has to navigate the lurid back drop of robust settings and tread the rough waters of making life-altering decisions early in the plot are often mocked, or at least avoided, by more conservative traditionalists. This is interesting to consider given that fairy tales originated within a Christian context, told by parents to their children in the pre-Renaissance era to convey some life lesson or point in a more a enjoyable and compelling way. We have all had some of the more renowned, enduring stories retold to us by Disney and other media platforms in a finicky fashion. Cinderella would be a prime example, though this story has been told and retold in seemingly innumerable ways. This may suggest that the majority of us resonate with the main character’s lot and see her as our proverbial representative in the world of tales. Nonetheless, I think deep within each of us there lies a longing to exist in a fairy tale – but not the sort like Peter Pan, where the character is flat and is flat precisely because he refuses to be rotund. Peter Pan is caught in a perpetual state of childishness, not because he refuses to fight pirates but because that’s all that he wants to do. He refuses to experience meaningful pain I order that his character – his person and personality – may grow. We are drawn to fairy tales, not simply because of the ‘happily ever after,’ but because of the journey to the ‘happily ever after.’ What I mean is this: the pleasure and joy that comes at the end of fairly tales only seems sweet because of the bitterness that was endured on the way to the end. After eating ice cream, cake does not seem so sweet. But after a mouthful of parsley or lime, cake never tasted so scrumptious. Perhaps our culture is addicted to ice cream; not the ‘Mint Oreo’ or ‘Toffee Chip’ variety, but the metaphorical bypassing of meaningful pain. We miss the real reward and pleasure meant to be experienced in life by trading it for cheap pleasures that seem sweet, but in the end turn into a mouthful of gravel. Perhaps we should prescribe to welcoming more of the ‘rocky road’ of life so that the joy that “comes in the morning” after the “sorrow that lasts for the night” can sincerely be experienced
