Social Media and tech in general would have us believe that we can have perfectly curated lives. Only showing what we want the world to see. Only allowing us to share what we want. Then sometimes not sharing is as telling as sharing everything.
However to have things curated in our lives to the point that our human lives become a seamless production takes a volume of extraordinary planning. Guess what though? Life happens. And as my mother often says “It never rains but it pours”. Here deep down at the tip of Africa that is the blessing that we are waiting for. I’ve been standing looking at the skies waiting for the rain to come not thinking about what to do with the rain when it gets here. So please excuse me while a run off and get some buckets.
I’m working on a new theory, that has no basis other than my own musings and some unsubstantiated references that I can’t fully remember.
The Seasons Of Life is something that has been bumping around my head ever since I first connected with Stevie Nick’s Landslide . Can I handle the seasons’ of my life? I’ve been carrying this lyric around with me for some time now it’s poetry captures something that we are all aware of, that we can’t quite put our finger on. We as humans have our own rhythms that follow a life cycle unique to us. Kind of like dog years. Our life cycles have less to do with earth years than we might imagine as our home planet circumferences the sun.
Our lives can feel split into very different stages and in fact we can feel like very different people to ones we we started off as. Yet very little in society is geared towards these changes, understanding them or accepting them. Instead we are programmed to be emotionally contained, financially viable, reproductive, ageless machines.
We are all expected to have family focused, connected lives without any guidance as to how, especially when we come from dysfunctional families ourselves. Yet respect is only garnered when we are raising families or indeed self-parenting ourselves in the perfect set up for our age. Whether it be a student flat in our early twenties, co-habiting partnership in our thirties, family homes in our forties and so it continues. Set one foot out of alignment with this carefully concocted materialistic display of how your life should be and you’ll feel the advert of human life short changing you. Unless you’ve been living on the family plot from the start? Then you just the centre of almost every movie ever made. You’re live is what has come to be expected of almost every film ever made, or lifestyle magazine. An established home of the upper middle classes that will allow you to flourish at poetry production and even get published (though it may not be any good).
So the seasons? Gestation, Infancy, Childhood, Puberty, Adulthood, Relationship, Parenthood, Elder, Death. None of them anything to do with money, all bringing their own emotional territory as we go along. Nought much to do with the planet either, Earth years just mark our supposed passages. When really they come in their own time. In their own season, not to be presupposed by our own human expectation.
Way back in the day all the beautiful stones in the world were apparently magically discovered only in river beds and were there waiting to be plucked out for us to enjoy. Now most of our gem stones come from deep underground and are laboriously mined and forced to the surface. I’m not saying one method is better than the other. Both methods involved some kind of work; getting wet and the other one digging deep.
As you’re lying, gasping for air, exhausted with your life, you are probably wondering what I’m asking of you? And if you have the capacity to continue. Well it’s a cop out. Only you know that. What I can say is that if you are very close to drowning or in the darkest of places there is treasure where you are. Next, you think I’m going to say “time heals everything”. No not really, however distance does. Why else would we end up on these strange cumbersome adventures. The thing is living in despair, which is a lot different to depression (though I doubt you’re going to find a super chipper desperado). It’s like going into an underground pub only to come out and be blinded by the light. To be desperate is to have teetered on the edge of hopelessness. If you’re lying on your back floating in the abyss right now wondering why you haven’t drowned, that the sharks haven’t eaten you, yet, and more than a little fucked off that they haven’t. Then I am probably the right guru for you (please bear in mind I don’t actually profess to know anything). I’m not talking about things going wrong for a day or a week or a year I’m about things going wrong for decades. Fucking decades and well if you have been there and every day is a struggle, a god damn war. Life is pointless it has no meaning.
That’s from your perspective. Perspective is the only thing that you have to change and given that you’ve probably physically experienced going round corners there’s a good chance that changing perspective is possible for you.
That sounds fucking patronising; that if you can walk round corners you can change your life? And well maybe it is. Seriously though maybe you are standing too close to the wall that you want to push through. There are many ways to overcome obstacles and if you want to break down a wall you have to be aware of the things that you might need. Just like breaking down a door you might want to take a step back in order to gain velocity and create force. Alternatively, you might want to build up speed to climb it. Or maybe with enough overview you might see a door out or a window through or even the edge or something.
We are all going to die anyway? Yes we are? And yes in this age we as humans seem to engage with existential crisis with a certain amount of vigour it’s entirely possible to wonder at the point of it all?
Embracing your insignificance is a bountiful step on the path back to the road that you are suppose to be on. What the actual fuck!? Just think about it a bit more. We are all invisible anyway why not use your super power for good.
So keep floating in the abyss. Don’t accidentally wake up dead and I’ll see you in the next installment.
