Full speed ahead. Rock ‘n’ Roll is dead. The girls and boys from the mickey mouse club clocked it in the head. TV makes people so tired, bored like a bird on a wire. I check the pulse and I light a match then I set the tele on … fire. Alice Smith: Fake Is the New Real
Weekend conversation spun around some things I hadn’t talked about in a couple of years. I used to be heavily involved in politics, up on all the issues, a believer in most conspiracies, a champion of the underprivileged, an oppressor-hater… I had an opinion about everything, and my goal was to have lots of opportunities to tell someone about it. Sometimes they agreed, sometimes they didn’t. That wasn’t the point anyway. The point was I knew what I was talking about. And I was doing something about it. Or was I…?
One day while watching a movie about the current atrocities of the “War on Terror,” I realized I was laying half-comatose on my couch, sobbing, trembling, filled with sadness and anger. I wanted to fight back. I wanted to make the powerful powerless. I wanted to make the terrorists terrified. I wanted the haters to be hated. I wanted to make the world be something other than what it was, because what it was was not good enough for me.
Then I looked around me. The house was a mess, the bills weren’t paid, I was in a relationship where my looks were paramount but my ideas were of questionable value, I couldn’t sleep…. I had been fighting the very same world that I desperately needed to embrace if I expected to survive, let alone thrive.
So I let it go. I let it all go. I turned off the television. I stopped scouring web sites. I resigned from my official position in the local political party. I got a job. I cleaned the house. I dumped the guy. And suddenly, there was no reason to fight. There was time to walk. Time to write. Time to listen to music. Suddenly I had no reason to be mad at the institutions and the corporations and the persecutors and the politicians and all the things that were fucking up the world. Because the world I saw wasn’t fucked up at all, it was full of natural beauty and interesting people and creativity and so much love. None of those horrible things even existed anymore.
For a little while I felt guilty. I felt guilt because somehow I thought I was turning my back on all of those people in need. However, as my own life became more productive, more wholesome, as I became less of a hypocrite, I realized I was finally living the life I so desperately wanted to be able to live. For so long I bought into the belief that I couldn’t feel happy unless everyone in the world was happy first. So wrong. So impossible. So tragically wasteful.
Step 1) be happy, love yourself. Step 2) share happiness, share love. In every moment ask: “Do I feel good?” If you do, appreciate it. And if you do not, turn your attention to something that does feel good.