When I walk down the street, I picture myself walking down an Israeli street. It might feel exactly the same. 

That neighbor could be my Israeli neighbor, muttering in Hebrew with her husband instead of in English. Walking down random streets tends to feel the same way, no matter where I am walking. 

The similarity is both comforting and unsatisfactory.

“No,” I tell myself. “It isn’t the same.”

Maybe I haven’t walked in enough places. What does it feel like to walk down a street in Athens? In Cairo? In Delhi? Is it similar? 

I’ll find out. Talk to me in five years. I will be an entirely different creation.

Still, no matter where I go, I doubt I could match the personal undertones felt when I walked down an Israeli street.

Why is a street in Israel so much better than anywhere else? It’s just pavement, grass and houses. Boring, really. Why did swimming in the Kinneret make me so happy? It was just water and sand and rocks.

No. In my own mind, an Israeli street could never be only pavement, grass, houses. That beach by the Kinneret was not just water, sand, and rocks.

When you read a novel, at times the settings and objects take on lives of their own. 

Pemberley was the impossibly perfect estate, on par with the ideals of beauty and excellence. 

Scarlet O’Hara would do anything for Tara, clinging to it long after she could afford the most garish mansion possible. 

Harry Potter entered Hogwarts and finally, he belonged. 

When the race of Men flourished, so did the White Tree of Gondor, to the point where the tree died when the Men were in trouble. 

The ruby slippers carried Dorothy across Oz, attracted enemies just because she wore them and ultimately, brought her home again.

It’s just an estate, a school, a tree, a pair of shoes. Why are they important?

“Don’t be an idiot,” one might say. “Hogwarts wasn’t just a school. It was a magical school of awesomeness. The ruby slippers had magic, too. They’re fictional. The authors could make them into anything they liked.”

Exactly. You can take anything you like and give it new meaning and it becomes significant to your life, separate from the mundane. It might be fictional or apply to reality, but the concept of investing new context into that object or place is the same, and that’s what gives these things a newer, more powerful definition. 

It is not just a school. It is Hogwarts. 

It is not just a lake. It’s the Kinneret.

As a writer, I would never claim that reality holds a more powerful sway than anything fictional. I would say the opposite is true, because our ability to imagine things that do not exist determines all change in our lives. 

Humanity has survived as long as we have by creating hypothetical context (story) and applying it to reality as if it existed. When we are inside a story, our bodies react the same way as if it were real, taking in all the facts at hand and supposing what would happen if it actually occurred. It forms an assessment and chooses the preferred path, whether or not that path can be taken. 

I walk down this street and I imagine myself in Israel, and everything feels better. It might not match the exact experience when I have it, but that is not important.

I make up a story, motivated by my past experiences. I might walk down a street in every country in the world, with the most beautiful and breathtaking scenery, and it will never be as valuable to me as walking down a random street in Israel, going about my everyday business. 

My human mind persists in suggesting that ideal as a constructive replacement for my current reality, not because it is utopia, but because it is the most attractive, most magical option for my own life, based on all the facts and hypotheticals. 

That is gut feeling. It points us where we should go and makes us dream of it until we go there.