You and some friends are hanging out and getting to know each other. What better time is there to bust out some icebreakers? Your friend Lisa brings up the classic: Two Truths and a Tale.
Lisa begins and her annoying valley girl accent fills the room.
"OK so like let me start and you guys need to guess the two truths and one lie. OK so like first thing is I went to Maui with my ex-boyfriend and we rented out an entire Subway for ourselves. Um…number two is I ate a watermelon thinking it was a strawberry or number three I had to freeze a wart off my ear when I was twelve."
The whole room fills with confusion followed by laughter. Was this girl actually being serious? After this icebreaker was over, you and your friends circled up again to continue the get-to-know-you games. You look around and see your friend Annie endlessly scrolling through the online Bible: Instagram. She's searching username after username to find what she's looking for. The thought that's been nagging and pushing you for months is finally coming out. An epiphany surfaces - The Green Glass Door. That's exactly what it is. This is the riddle that comes out from within and secretly torments us slowly day by day.
The thing is that social media only shows us what we want to see; we're only seeing what our minds want us to see. This is the Green Glass Door, or a metaphor for our minds, attitudes, thoughts, and beliefs. The game goes as follows: The player introduces the game and, say Player A, starts with, "There is a green glass door in the middle of Minnesota." Then Player A begins to list things that can or cannot go through the door. The other player, Player B, hears this riddle for the first time and has no idea what to think. They have to try to understand what can and cannot go through the door. Player A begins, "Root beer can go through the green glass door, but not soda. Feet can go through the door, but not toes." This makes no sense! This is the riddle that we don't know and yet it plagues our lives daily.
Here is where the riddle begins to fall into place. With riddles, we know to look for patterns, but what is it this time? You begin to fidget with your phone out of boredom decide to go on Instagram. You know it's that time of day to do your follow up on the prettiest and coolest girl in your town, @Lexie_loves_life34. Her first post is a picture of her and her dreamy looking boyfriend. The second post is her working at an elite, high paying job at a juice cleansing bar in Los Angeles, California. At the end of this cyberstalking, you feel like shit. This is a habit that develops over time. Days go by and the same pattern repeats itself.
Only certain objects are supposed to penetrate our minds, and it is all about the way we see the things around us. Most often, people playing the Green Glass Door don't realize that it isn't about the generalizations presented to us, it is about the intricacies we don't see or understand. Once we go on social media sites, we only see a smidge of someone's life and we interpret that information the way we want to see it. In the Green Glass Door, we don't realize that it is not about the words being presented to us all at once, it is about the breakdown of the words. Root Beer can go through the door because it has double letters, and soda cannot go through because it has no repeating letters.
When we pay attention to judgment based on big-picture ideas, we overlook the smaller things that tend to be the most important. We don't see that @Lexie_loves_life34's boyfriend is actually now gay and we also don't see that Lexie got fired from her juice cleansing job. Once we address the way we view things on social media, we can understand how our minds work like a Green Glass Door.
