In the Super Mario Deluxe game for the Nintendo Switch, Mario can get a power-up from red acorns that give you flight powers in the form of a squirrel suit.
Nadine often watches her brothers play, and whenever an acorn appears, they say, "Get the squirrel suit! Grab it!"
She found a wooden acorn toy at our house today, and when Jonas tried to take it from her, she said, "No, that's my squirrel suit!"
She actually believes that acorns are squirrel suits. She pranced around the room, pretending the acorn was giving the power of flight.
We all know that, in reality, acorns don't allow you to fly. But sometimes, we hold onto these ideas that certain things have power, even when they don't really give us anything at all. They won't help us level up the way we think they will, and yet we lose so much sleep and time and money and energy trying to access them anyway because we believe those things are squirrel suits. We want to fly, and we've been told that these simple acorns are our ticket to the sky.
I have tons of these fake-corns in in my own life. Everybody does. And a lot of fake-corns are learned from the messages around us. We even reinforce them with each other.
Instead of refraining from gossip and talking negatively about people, we engage -- in the hope it will help us fit in socially or gain influence from a sphere of friends. We hope that by speaking about someone else in a certain way, we will define ourselves differently.
Instead of committing and really living a certain moral code, we compromise it for fear of being an outsider, for looking and sounding different, for being perceived as weird. We even go so far as to laugh at, shake our heads at, or pass judgement on people who really are dedicated to something beyond themselves. How naive and silly they must be, how much they must miss out on, how strange to give up so much.
Instead of recognizing that a body is a gift, a tool, a help, an amazing thing, we put it down, we starve it, we talk badly about it, we compare it with other bodies, we hate it, we decide it is disgusting and useless and unworthy. We make excuses for it, apologize for taking up space, cover it up when it might not be beautiful, and still spend money trying to make it -- cough, cough -- better (looking) than it was before.
In the first example, the space for kindness narrows, while the path for hurt and dishonesty broadens to a highway. Our potential for influence decreases, while our ability to cause problems for others increases.
In the second, the potential for true self-mastery is laughed at, and the opportunity cost is celebrated. The door of personal responsibility shuts gradually, while the window of self-indulgence opens as an alternative exit.
And in the third, the chance to define our lives based on what we can do, instead of based on what we look like while we do it, fades into a graveyard of missed opportunity. Hundreds, no thousands or tens of thousands, of people are overlooked because they just weren't enough of a body to be seen at all. Instead of looking outward at what we can offer, what we can do to help, what we can give, and what we can achieve, we see ourselves as objects for other people to view and approve of, always stopped at the border of a better country by the patrol of our own self-hatred.
Don't chase the acorns that are only just acorns. They don't have the power of flight. They won't take you higher. They aren't balloons; they are anvils.
