I’ve been watching Euphoria… 😶
I don’t exactly know the word to describe how it makes me feel but it’s definitely not good.
Hopeless, worried, nauseated, scared.
I’m not gonna be all like “kids nowadays” blah blah blah because all generations have had to fight their own demons and as teenagers (and adults too) we have to battle with hopelessness everyday. We all have to deal with the disenchantment of life. We are all looking for meaning.
Let’s not pretend that as ‘functional’ adults we never feel we’d rather drown into a void than cope with the shit that the world is constantly throwing at us: War, corruption, climate debacle, social unrest, animal cruelty, child pornography… I mean, you name it. There’s plenty of reasons to want to escape reality, to be depressed, to self-harm, to do drugs…
I understand. There’s A LOT of nasty stuff going on and people telling you to “focus on the positive” is just not fucking enough most of the times. I know that life is well… tough. When I was growing up I used to see dead bodies on the side of the road on my way to school. Sometimes hands tied, once even a beheaded one. Life can be fucked up. And I know we are all dying to get a break from it. I’ve felt the warm embrace of insanity; I’ve heard her voice beckoning me, offering some respite from this other type of madness, the madness of the living, which always seems so full of cruelty, of selfishness, of violence… always so absurd… “the horror, the horror”.
BUT
I also know true ecstasy and euphoria. I know that as capable as we are of descending to the deepest pits of despair, we are also capable of real happiness, boisterous creativity, beauty and love.
I’ve felt my heart inflamed by love looking into a friend’s eye and realising in that moment we have both understood the meaning of life, even if for a split second. I’ve tested the stretch of romantic love, falling in love fast and hard with one, two, three people at a time, and delighted in their tenderness, their different love languages, their ways of making love. I’ve wept at the sight of a waterfall in India, and whilst gently being rocked by the dance of the Welsh sea.. I’ve felt the souls of animals and trees. I’ve felt ‘god’, whatever that word is. I’ve found a partner to hold me every night, to give peace to my restless mind. And with him I made a baby and birthed him in my living room in a trance like nothing I had experienced before. Joy! Pure ecstatic joy… I’ve felt it.
Have you?
I feel that as adults we can’t just stay in a lazy state of perplexity; we can’t simply moan and preach about the dangers of social media, shaking our heads at the tune of the “back- in-the -day song” whilst we provide nothing else for kids to engage with. We can not expect them to feel excited about life and condemn the abuse of drugs, or the meaningless and irresponsible sex or any of it, whilst we offer them no real sources of joy and hope. We don’t need to buy them more stuff! We don’t have to take them around the world. We don’t even have to tell them to play outside or turn off the iPad for our insistence on it by itself will have no impact. It’s easier, yet harder than that: we have to be willing to feel.
We need to be excited about life ourselves! To allow pleasure in again, not as an escape from the world but as a way of being in love with it. Not as a way of numbing the pain, but as a way of living with it. To enjoy our bodies, our food, the rain, the sun, a kiss, the wind, the sex! Take life in, explode in thunderous laughter; sing, dance; care, but really care as opposed to worrying. Open our hearts and make love to life as if it’s the last chance we have for it because you know… it is. We as ‘we’ will never again exist. So let’s be us. And love ourselves for it. This is how we parent through it all
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