Chapter 1, Stories That Change

However, when I sat with perspective and looked back over a life veiled in trauma and shame, a life hidden in the shadows of experience, a life spent watching other people connect, well, I figured that sitting there with that therapist was perhaps the bravest thing I could have ever done.  And with that, I let go of my lingering shame and allowed him to remain my mate for another six months, accepting that life was exactly as it needed to be.   Acceptance.  A big word.  A loaded word.  It calls on one to become a better person, it calls on one to take in the bigger picture of life.  It also calls on a person to step into the wonder of the moment that is now.  When you accept, you sit still with your body and mind and allow all that arises to pass, be it good or bad, light or dark.  We lie about who we are.  For the most part this is true, everyone is lying to themselves, about themselves, about the life they are living, because the truth is scary.

Teenagers see this clearer than anyone, perhaps that’s why they are so angry a lot of the time, because they look around at all of these adults telling them how to live life, yet they don’t see many adults living an existence they would aspire to mimic.  You know, let’s cut through the ego-protective layer of crap that anything is right about the world.  Do you know what I know?  I was not born to this earth of potential adventure, wonder and awe to follow the rules and ways of others and do what I’m told forever, especially if those others have no sense of joy about them.  Let joy be your radar folks, listen to no one in misery or pain, listen to those who have found joy, for they have walked a path worth learning from.

We live in a world overstimulated by and desensitized to pain and suffering, which means we think that it’s normal.  Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s not!  Nothing about the way we live as human animals is normal, we are so far removed from our natural way of being that it has become something to be debated.  Just take a look at the word diet, how many stories live in your body and mind that are attached to that one word?  Too many to count, right?  Earlier I referred to acceptance as a big word, but so too is the word, diet.  This one word triggers a whole array of thoughts, feelings, urges and impulses within everyone.  So how did these ‘components of self’ come to be there?  How did this combination of beliefs, opinions, judgements and ‘knowledge’ come to live inside of you and therefore determine particular patterns and cycles of your day-to-day existence?

Before we go into dissecting the stories that make us, we first need to understand how they came to be a part of us and how they influence our somewhat auto-piloted existence.  From birth we are subjected to an onslaught of sensory experiences, none of which we choose, very few of which are consciously chosen for us.  We are born to this earth a tiny, vulnerable, squirming little animal, full of needs that require meeting, with too many parents ignorant to their own ignorance.  Is it a fear of failure that keeps parents from expanding their knowledge, too scared as they are, be it consciously or subconsciously, that they have gotten it so undeniably wrong?  Do they worry that they’ve messed their kids up in some irreversible way, so it becomes easier to avoid the topic altogether and simply smother the situation in denial and shame, pretending all is fine?  Or did they simply receive nothing that looked like love themselves as a child, and so have zero reference as to how to bestow it upon their own offspring? 

Love begets love, and parents are like computer chips, ready to install patterns, stories and beliefs into their children.  What are you uploading them with?  Now that is a great question to ponder, even before any planned conception, especially since it may highlight that you’ve got some self-work to do before harming a child by simply being who and what you presently are.  These are the harder truths, but of no less value than the knowing that when your decision is to feed your child with nutritious homemade meals, their inward world will become much healthier than a body fed with processed, greasy and fatty foods.  Healthy love is what our young need, now more than ever, and it is a thing to be learned, cultivated and bestowed; not necessarily given, because love is a thing to become, not really to give and to take.

Love begets love, an important thing to ponder as we move on…  Especially since it’s sad to see how many people tick on pretending everything is fine.  You know, quite a lot of the time life is not okay, another thing that teenagers are very aware of, yet another story they are told they’ve gotten wrong.  Why?  Because the adults are right, always.  End of.  Funnily enough, even when proven wrong with reason, logic and doubt, they still find themselves pulling the long straw of an argument at times.  I have always found age a weird thing to measure wisdom by in truth, because I have heard the most ignorant and ill-informed words come out of a pensioner’s mouth, and the truest of wisdom blurted out by a three-year-old.

I think back to a conversation with my friend’s son, Jessiah, in reference to the veggie garden my friend Kasim ensures he grows with his sons every summer (shout out to Marley, both boys need their names on this page).  Kasim lives in Montserrat, and being a native Caribbean Rasta he inherited particular mindsets towards nature and food, consequently, these staples of life are cherished and talked about.  My brother from another mother connects the dots of existence for his boys and lets them watch the magic of life grow and transform before their eyes.  What a wonderful mirror nature presents for our own journeys:

Me:  Jessiah, I heard you’re growing some strawberries?
Jessiah (in an absolutely incredulous tone):  I am not!  They’re growing themselves.
Me:  Far out, Little Dude!  Yes they are. Yes. They. Are.

My tiny friend’s words still vibrate through me today and they remain some of the wisest I’ve ever heard spoken aloud.  I believe that so much wisdom is to be found in innocence, less so in the learned man and woman.  Knowledge vs. wisdom, an interesting debate for philosophers.  I, however, decided that I reserve the right to choose what I think for myself; it seems everyone else does, it’s just that not enough people think about what they think.  I’d like to look at how that conversation might go with an adult, let’s call him Stuart:

Me:  Hey Stu, I heard you’ve been growing some strawberries?
Stuart:  Oh yeah, they’re delicious, much juicier than the ones I grew last year. I prepared a better mulch this time. And check these out, the blueberries are ripening too.  Green fingers award, here I come!
Me: Nice one. May I try one, please?

An equally pleasant conversation, but of a less mind-blowing nature.  You see, Stuart has adopted the false belief that the growth of the strawberries is his own personal achievement, that he is somehow responsible for their very nature, to grow, flower and fruit.  If he were smart, he’d realize wholeheartedly that he might offer nutrients to this living entity, he might monitor and maintain a consistent environment, but he has nothing to do with the fact that they grow or even exist.

As much can be said for children.  I watch adults pride themselves on their offspring, on the fact that they have reproduced a tiny human and care for its basic needs, despite not even doing that well half of the time.  But let’s get this straight, there is no miracle in birth, it happens over a million times a week all over the world.  Life is the common miracle, and we live this miracle every single day, yet we are born having forgotten it and there are very few people around to remind us.  That miraculous energy of a new-born baby, the glow of joy and love they spread through a room, this is the essence of life’s energy being felt, not simply a collective nod to the ‘miracle of birth.’

THE WORLD IS CHANGING.
AND WHY IS IT CHANGING?
BECAUSE WHAT WE KNOW IS CHANGING.

Knowledge is power.  Knowledge is change.  Knowledge is an ever-evolving entity fuelled by the minds of humankind.  I once met a man in the Swiss Alps, Silvio, a sculptor of stone and maker of music.  He would make large, musical, stone xylophones, which, when played, would emit deep vibrations, sometimes sounding like the call of an orca, and take them to do vibrational work with children in local schools.  He also loved playing with words, dissecting their origins and presenting delectable nuggets of contemplation.  He once said to me, as we sat around a friend’s kitchen table, ‘Knowledge, it has no-ledge.’

It took me years to gain clarity with regard to these words that lingered.  For me, the words that stick always require revisits and revisions until they make sense, they are like a riddle that needs to be solved and it wasn’t until recently that I understood what the words meant to me.  You see, I’ve been searching for something all of my life, call it what you will, a quest for meaning, a longing for a deeper purpose, a lost soul wandering aimlessly for its calling.  Yet, it was none of these things that drove my thirst for a variety of lived experience and knowledge, it was a deep knowing I’d had since a young age that no adults around me seemed to have a clue what they were talking about.  No one had the knowledge I was seeking, perhaps that which might bring a sense of peace and purpose.  Not one person I observed was living a life that I aspired to live, and something just felt very off about it all. 

Now, as I’ve grown and matured, gained perspective and forgiven my elders for their perceived failures, I can see that they did not fail at all, they simply didn’t know what I know; they were programmed with different thoughts, beliefs and behaviours.  Different ‘knowledge’.  They were trapped in a past that was not my own, which does not put them at fault, it simply makes them human.  Isn’t it the way of things, to reluctantly repeat the ways of our elders?  Does this not shine a new light on the so-called teenage rebellion, when our young seem so convinced that we’re wrong about things, yet they remain brave and bold enough to tell us so, as well as naïve enough to consider that they might possibly win the war they wage against adulthood?  But mightn’t the teens be right and it be the adults who’re wrong?  Weren’t we once also those righteous teens, living the same tumultuous transition into adulthood, unable to even fathom the notion of our lives replicating that of our parents’?  However, don’t most of us eventually succumb to some compromised existence, one which our younger selves would perhaps give us a slap for sitting still and accepting?

So, is it time for us, as a collective group of informed and learned grown-ups, to admit more to the truth of our human ways and help free our young from them?  Is it time to admit that every single collective, society and nation throughout history has considered themselves right about certain things, things that have later come to be dispelled or disproven?  Although, it’s important to note that things are never merely disproven, I prefer to say that they are developed or built upon, like a complex structure, with every brick, screw and nail there to hold things in place.  I imagine our human knowledge to be a bit like a constructional matrix, made up of light, time and space, with every minute particle finding meaning by way of its place in the bigger picture.

It’s time to acknowledge that knowledge has no ledge, it will evolve, change and transform forever.  Those who came before us were determinably wrong about many things, so might we be too?  Could we even be so bold as to say that we are most certainly wrong about a heck of a lot?  For change and growth to happen we must make space for it to do so. A plant cannot grow in a damp, dark cupboard, it needs space, fertile soil, sunlight and water.  Might we too require particular energetic elements as growing individuals?  Might we respond well when surrounded by particular vibrations, might our physiological systems decompress and find release in the expressive arts, mightn’t physics and chemistry come to inform the way we approach our practices with children?  Might an overcrowded and loud classroom for a proportionate period of time in childhood not be the best environment within which to learn and become your best self? 

We all come to be in much the same manner; be born, live some stuff, learn some stuff, become this utterly unique individual with a label (your name), and let’s not forget the final chapter, be dead.  This is certainly oversimplifying life into one of the basest of forms, however, it’s relatively accurate.  And so, if life really is this miracle, if it’s all we get, whether it be one or multiple reincarnations, whether there be an afterlife, whether the sky really be blue, what does it matter?  I say we get to talking about how to live life well and in order to do that, we must first look at how humans, en masse, came to live it so very poorly.