Good Noodles - Essay

In The Matrix there is a scene where Neo, now fully integrated in the new reality of the red pill, is on a mission with other Nebuchadnezzar crew members in the old reality called the matrix. Neo knows that what he has experienced since his awakening is a far greater and more powerful reality than the one from which he was recently liberated, which was nothing more than a dangerous illusion. Still, old ways of thinking die hard. In one scene, as he is riding with Trinity in the back of a very hip Lincoln Continental down a street once familiar to him in the matrix, they pass a restaurant.

“I used to eat there,” he says to Trinity, a twinge of excitement in his tone. She stares back as if to ask what he could possibly have been eating, knowing what he knows from this new vantage. Getting the point from her stare alone, that food in the matrix could not have been food at all, he quietly mumbles to himself, “Good noodles.” 

Sometimes we who begin to see a different reality than the one long familiar, leap from our cages with great ferocity. This is as it should be. One cannot fault any being for unwillingness to stay in an environment that suddenly reveals itself to be something other than advertised. However, we often find ourselves  in a new reality without a familiar foundation under us. Difficulty can arise because we are creatures of habit. It’s how we’re wired. In many ways, habits sustain us as they have for tens of thousands of years. Ancient ancestors walked certain paths through jungles and plains because they were deemed safe enough. But we have all had habits that were not safe. While inhabiting and negotiating new realities, we are sometimes wont to return to old ways simply for the benefit of experiencing something familiar. So we are tempted to go back to the belief system that no longer feeds us, or the substandard career, or the dangerous relationship.

Good noodles.

In the end, it pays to remember that we are in a different reality than that which we once knew. The things that once fed us are no longer valid food. When those old, comforting habits or beliefs arise that destroy our energy, our sense of oneness with All, our peace, our innate sense of our soulful beauty, it makes sense to smile at the illusion that we once trusted and note the soft distance between it and our new reality, and all the reasons we once left it. We might even note the wounds that once drew the illusions toward us in the first place and choose to see the healing, yet incomplete, that is taking place within us. New friends and soulful habits, and an appreciation for the process of becoming - with its myriad, rainbow emotions and experiences - can all assist us when delicious old restaurants reappear outside our window.

In the end, what serves us best is to cruise on by, a slight smile on our lips.