Once you are real you can’t become unreal again!

Just happened to by accident bump into a child’s story “The Velveteen Rabbit” .  It has a very beautiful conversation between two toys the rabbit and horse on “what is real”.   It is simply so amazing and so true.

“What is REAL?” asked the Velveteen Rabbit one day… “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?” 

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When [someone] loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand… once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

If we read between lines, being real is all it takes.   In life most of us try doing and saying thing for the sole purpose of  “looking good”.  The want to  “look good” always gives room to fake.    This looking good happens with all;  family friends, employees, clients.. there comes a time when the other person realises and “the looking good” act comes to open and then all the “looking good” gets reciprocated with the other person trying to “look good”.

Isn’t it simpler to be real.  When you have to tell someone “this is not right” all it takes is genuinely say it.  If the saying is out of care and is “real” I am sure there be no room for misunderstanding.  I can recollect a number of learning in my life,  only because someone out there was “real” with me.  People confuse “real” with rudeness.  You can be very soft and yet be direct and real.  I am a “no nonsense person”,  so I have the habit of  pulling up my staff, but I am sure they get groomed and a lot of fineness gets into the personality.  Of course when some points fingers and says “you are wrong” it hurts, but that all temporary.  But at the end of the day ‘real’ is real.

The other thing which this conversation brings out is, that it’s just not enough to be real when you give,  it is also important to be real when you receive.

“When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”