If you live in a city or suburb you will probably hope to get away for a change of scenery. As you stand on top of a moor, hearing only sheep bleating, you will say to yourself ‘This is Real Life.’ The same thoughts will surface if you stand on a rocky outcrop feeling the spray from the waves pounding below, or perhaps you have visited a peaceful holy island, Iona or Lindisfarne.
Supposing you move somewhere remote and idyllic, or to the coast and can saunter down to the beach on a wild winter day, dodging waves. Sheer bliss. Then one day you go up to London to visit friends or relatives or for a cultural outing. As you arrive at a London terminus, descend into the underground, hear the rumble of an approaching tube train, then squeeze on board with the multitudes, you find yourself saying ‘Back to Real Life!’
Could it be that real life must involve cities, mainline railway stations and underground trains?
Those millions of us brought up in suburbs anywhere in the world are bound to feel we are never in real life; neither in the bustling heart of the city, nor in the countryside growing food and raising livestock to feed the nation.
When you turn on the television news real life takes on a different dimension. Why are your working on the cheese counter at Waitrose when that girl you were at school with is now a war correspondent standing on a heap of rubble?
Is real life the peace all great prophets have urged us to follow; cherishing the soil, creating harmony, music, arts, science and babies. Or is reality living on a knife edge beneath a volcano or on an earthquake fault line? Are you likely to see your home swept away by fire or flood or do you face death every day in war?
Have you experienced real life or are you still waiting to find it?
What is your reality?
Times and Tides of a Beachwriter 
My life is fairly sheltered. What real life I had is slowly being erased, e.g., my youngest grandchild was astounded a few years ago when she discovered I once had a job.
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As long as you can still remember you once had a job….
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Sometimes it does seem surreal. I tell the grandchildren I used to be important. They laugh. At least they think I am funny.
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My grandchildren’s parents have important jobs that outshine my career disasters!
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Hmm, I live almost on top of the San Andreas earthquake fault line, and presently, the possibility of my home being swept away by fire is a very real danger, but other than that, my life is pretty mundane. A trip into London would be a real thrill!
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Well done Judy, you’re definitely living on the knife edge and those fires are very real.
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At this point, real life lives inside my head .
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A good place to keep it Liz.
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That’s my thought!
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I have a horrible feeling that some of us dwellers in pleasant suburbs may just get a dose of real life in the form of climate disaster or some sort of politically influenced upheaval.
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So true Audrey, things don’t always just happen to other people far away.
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Real life…for me although to many I live somewhere idylic…I still have to do washing, cook, clean windows shopping etc and yes I am listening to the birds tweetting very loudly and apart from them there is noise…but its my real life xx
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Hello Carol, yes reality also contains the daily chores most of us have to do. Your real life now I expect you would never have imagined when your family were young.
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Absolutely not I didn’t stop from morning until night 7 days a week and when I look back I don’t know how we managed and yet I see my children doing the same….
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Yes Carol and women are still working hard, especially if they have a busy job as well.
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A thought provoking post Janet…I have experienced a number of different realities, some of which were on the edge of danger. I am comfortable living where I do now which is relatively isolated from the reality of what is going on in the outside world, and use my imagination to escape even further into fantasy worlds where I can control the narrative. ♥
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Thanks Sally, yes most of us have had different realities. Being comfortable where you are is a very good thing and the world of the imagination is an excellent place to be.
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Food for thought. I loved reading your post and the idyllic scenes you shared.
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Thanks, glad you enjoyed it.
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I had 60 years of a very (in fact extreme) real life in central London, 33 of those years spent on shift work in the emergency services. So in 2012, I had enough of real life and moved to a village in Norfolk where life didn’t seem real at all, as if I had stepped into a time machine and gone back to the 1950s. Now after 12 years of that, my previous life in London feels like a dream, and the Norfolk village life has become reality.
Best wishes, Pete.
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Yes Pete, you can’t get more real than your London life, but it’s good the Norfolk life turned out to be real! I’ve met quite a few people who retired and left Heathrow only to return and take another job at the airport as they had soon got bored.
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My life feels pretty real out here in darkest rural Wales – where the maps used to say ‘here be dragons’. I have known too many people who assured themselves that life would start when they moved / retired / won the lottery / built their shed but put off doing whatever in case it didn’t work out as they expected – like the people you know who retired and didn’t like it. I want to live before I die!
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Yes you are certainly living the real life. My parents took us out to Australia in 1964, while mum’s sister and brother-in-law stayed in the same little terraced suburban house, same place they both came from, for the rest of their lives!
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Fear of change and challenge is so powerful but often destructive.
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Thanks Sally, I just found this lurking in my spam folder!
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Real life is what you are living right now. That’s as real as it gets. The grass is always greener as they say but it may not be real grass!
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Hello Darlene, yes so true.
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Great post to make us think Janet. I feel like I’m living real life as a spectator, mouth wide open, eyes in surprise, shaking my head at the world around me – including my own country. 🙂
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Thanks Debby, yes it does seem to have made people think. As writers we do wonder if we are taking part or just looking on.
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Definitely! 🙂
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Hi Janet, can real life not be both: the reality of work, Hobbies and home life and the joys of vacationing in foreign cities and venturing into the wild. For me, both are my realities and I couldn’t manage one without the other.
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Yes Robbie there are plenty of answers to one question and in reality experiencing one sort of life makes you appreciate the other parts.
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Yes, this is true
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I often think I’d love a life away from masses of people. I wonder…
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Hello Jacqui, yes what we think we would like and the reality are often very different.
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Well put.
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Thanks Andrew
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You’re welcome.
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An interesting reflection and question, Janet. Oh, I’m going to very very cliched, and remark on the journey that makes up real life, the good, bad, beautiful, and ugly. It’s rewarding when we can tune into each step, see ourselves as transient, and take note of our limited time. That said, if I had my druthers, I’d spend the rest of life in the wilderness. 🙂
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Thanks Dianne, yes appreciate each step and don’t think you are still on the way to reality.
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Lol. Yes
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Real life is the life we make for ourselves/or born into without a choice – if it doesn’t look like the majority, it doesn’t make it any less real, but it can always lack, or stretch and grow, depending on our wants and needs, opportunities we seek out and the choices we make…that’s the thing, overall I think we have more power over what our ‘real life’ reality is than we think 🤗✨
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Maybe real life is what you go out and find for yourself. I always liked Alan Bennet’s line ‘I used to think life was what happened to other people.’ which is what I thought when I was a teenager ha ha. I’m still surprised life happened!
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