Get Under The sun

Sometimes, it’s always good to step out of the comfort of your home and touch some grass. Get under the sun, breathe in fresh air that’s not tainted by the scent of your home, go out there and meet celebrities, meet other people. Then, you’d realize that there really is not much. And everything that happens to everyone else is not that big a deal.

As long as you’re studying and analyzing things and people through the screens of your phone or your TV, you will never really know the direct impact it can have on you. It’s always your typical case of “You have to be there to get it”. But for many of us, we’re never really there, so we prefer to just go with whatever our minds conjure. And most of the time, that’s just wrong.

There is this form of distance that one feels, whether we notice it or not, when we study things through our phones. Either through social media or blogs and articles. We see the people on there as “those people”; they are far, far away, and they deal with issues that are very different from ours in surroundings that are just as different as well. But then, when you get to meet them, you’d realize that these are people just like you, and a lot of things become clearer.

Last year, I started to be more outgoing, and due to that, I’ve come across multiple celebrities. These are people who were larger than life on my screens, but standing before them, it’s almost like I’m reminded that they’re flesh and blood like me, and if they could do these things, then I should just be fine. I’ve had this experience multiple times.

But sadly, this is only the better scenario. Because it definitely gets worse, this is how we treat insecurity and such matters in our country. We hear it on the news, we read it on social media, but we don’t really care because it’s happening to “them,” not “us”. It’s all happening “there not “here”, and because of that, we’re good and perfectly fine!

So, when we talk about things that have happened, how many people have been killed and kidnapped, we address it as something that happened to ‘them’ and not ‘us’. This is because we’re detached. As long as it didn’t happen to us, it’s a bit difficult to fully grasp the scope of what it really means.

In the past, news sent correspondents to hot spots where they recorded these things, and with careful footage, they showed everyone the horror. But now, will that work? Not really, many of us don’t even trust the news anymore. If we really want a change, we need to learn to place ourselves in the shoes of people. From the celebrities we see on the screen to the victims of insecurity, we also see them on the screen. We place ourselves in the shoes of these people and try to experience what they went through, see what they’re suffering. Then, let it guide our next moves.

Because as long as we keep being detached from the things we see online, we’ll keep thinking that it’s far away and other people’s business. Until it comes to our doorstep, and by then, there is nothing we can do about it.

We really need to do better.