Breathing Through Your Belly Button

When I was 14, I met a girl who couldn't breathe if someone covered her navel. She often wore crop tops, exposing her waist. Resting a finger on her belly button—ever so gently!—was enough to make her gasp and push me away in panic. Even a flat hand hovering over her stomach made her uneasy. I thought it was silly.

The way my school friends would become ecstatic on a Sunday, then cry in dejection the following one, all based on the number of times a synthetic-leather sphere had crossed two imaginary rectangles in a faraway stadium—and the way others hurt each other and vandalized things for the same reason—it baffled me every time.

Those things don't exist, I thought; they don't really happen! They have no physical bearing on the people who think them: they could safely go on with their lives by ignoring them.

Then I heard someone talk about "First World problems," and it got me thinking. I could not sleep without the perfect pillow. I would leave shellfish on my plate, untouched and wasted because "I didn't like them." I was embarrassed to walk outside after spilling ice cream on my pants. Was I whining about fake, "First World problems"? Could I just ignore those things?

I found more things in my own life that didn't exist, didn't really happen: the pain of speaking in public, the terrible consequences of being late to an appointment with friends, the end of the world if I failed the next test. None of that was physically true, yet I felt and behaved as if it were.

Fiction, fiction everywhere! The money in every bank account is fiction: we only pretend it exists. The hurt I felt when a loved one was mean to me wasn't "real," either: words are harmless vibrations of the air. The project I worked on with my team was nothing more than text scattered over many files, yet we worked hard and argued as if this invisible thing called "our product" already existed and made demands of us. Relationships can't be touched or seen, and neither can cultures, holidays, the lack or abundance of time. Religion, business, games, states, love, hate, and duty are nothing more than mind-stuff, even though we (mentally) relate them to physical objects.

All these things are of the Tinkerbell kind: simply stop—all of us—believing in them, and they will disappear.

In my quest to find the Real around me, I found that nothing was: if I wanted to care only about the physical, I'd have to ignore the entire world.

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

—Thomas Theorem, W. I. & D. S. Thomas

I decided not to ignore. It's all in our heads—that's what makes it real. Silly, perhaps, but every person's breath depends on it. ●