Exploding the Fantasy

The fairytale aspect of life is presented ad nauseum both by books and films and TV shows. One of the primary sells being that the magic princess/prince will arrive, snow white charger optional, and whisk you into a life beyond your wildest dreams. Nightmare more like. At least for over 50% of us.

Case in point: Carol (not her real name) is a 40 year old woman living up the road from me. Attractive. Five children. Two husbands under her belt. Children by 3 different partners. None of whom give her a dime of support for her family's well-being. So we the people do it with our slim taxation dollars. Us 99% I am referring to, of course. I doubt if it crosses the 1%'s mind that such people exist. And if it did it would be “their own fault,” “bootstraps,” and “I'm alright, Jack”.

Nothing wrong with Carol and her life, though there are some that judge her. All the time. Her unhappiness leaks nearly every day from her Facebook posts. She is poorly educated and if you knew why, you would weep (snippet: as a toddler she saw her mother murdered in a bath of blood by her father). Her dream for the knight to ride in and save her has never left her mind since she was fourteen. She just made poor choices in the past, you see. But HE is still out there and will find her. Just like the soaps she watches in the afternoons. So she does herself up right sexy before she even opens her door and zeroes in on any available upright man who walks around. HE will be the one. It is a constant uphill struggle as sometimes they use and sometimes outright reject her. But her poverty and belief in this dream enables her to continue getting up in the morning.

It never crosses her mind to get an education now that all the children are in school full-time. To change. To determine that her happiness is an inside job. Not the knight's responsibility. I've spoken to her about this. About the joy of personal fulfilment and she looks at me sideways. This credo has absolutely no perceivable benefit to her. I just don't get it, you see.

How many countless others are waiting like her for this fantastical teevee land of Father Knows Best and its ilk?

No one talks about failure having much better odds than success in a relationship. And if we included the incredibly unhappy and abusive ones that manage to hold together in a kind of misery loves company toxicity, the odds would be overwhelming indeed.

Why does no one ever talk about limiting the size of their families in this overpopulated and abused planet - while we breed ourselves to the point of extinction? Children are being raised in poverty just about everywhere by single parents. Why? Because they believed in that Princ(ess) Charming and forever with a brood of happy kids frolicking in the meadow. Hell, if the sex is good than it follows that everyone and everything around us would be too, right?

I was one. The only lifestyle that improved after my divorce was that of my ex-husband. All sorts of both material and other benefits were cut from my two children's lives. I had bought into the dream too, you see. Like most of us. Forever and ever, amen.

What a crock of shyte as my people would say.

It is time we stopped this massive delusion.

So that Carol's children won't perpetuate the insanity.

Gross National Product

Photo from the deck today: Spring, she be happenin'.

I don't know where I read this and I'm too tired to go web search but the gist of the essay was that we are measuring all the wrong stuff when we give out GNP numbers. What we should be measuring is the happiness of our citizens.

Oh boy. Right on, I say. There is a pall of unhappiness in the world that is tangible. Disasters, nuclear (or truly as I prefer the linguist Dubya's pronunciation: Nukular)power failures and non-containment: a personal worry as two of my family members were in Tokyo at the time of the tsunami - I can never quite get used to that word, we would call it 'Tidal Wave' in the old days. They are shaken and stirred but fine, praise be Gaia. One is hoping to get out today. As to the tragedies of so many uncountable deaths continuing to unfold there - it must be unbearable.

Economic meltdowns continue to domino, country by country and does anyone know what is happening in the world of our neighbour down south apart from multiple Charlie Sheehans? Big stuff afoot I hear. Here we are playing hopscotch with maybe an election, maybe not, as our prime minister Harper crowns himself king of all Da Canadian and Canadien and First Nations Peebles, officially like, with a replacement of Government of Canada notepaper with, I kid you not, The Harper Government headlining all official government communications from what used to be a democracy. Sort of. Laws? Schplaws. The king has spoken, long live, etc. But I think we would all take him down physically and exile him on an icepan off Labrador if he so much as touched our universal health care.

Meanwhile in my little neck of the woods I am reminded over and over and over again of what happiness is when I go out and about. One never leaves Newfoundland. People ache when they leave here, they cry (I do) when they leave, they cry when they come back (I do).

I'd say we have the highest GNP (based on happiness) in the whole world. Seriously. You'd have to get to a community dance here, or be at the theatre where I was on Friday night at Jake's Gift
and after the show the actor comes out and says she had to say, and she breaks down and cries, and says that she had toured all of Canada, more tears, and she had not been prepared for the people of Newfoundland who were a nation all to themselves with the welcome and their openheartedness and love.

And I was reminded of that at a BBQ dinner dance I was at on Saturday night where the band, ZOMG the band, played my kind of rock 'n roll and we danced and we danced.

And people talked of all the fund raising going on lately, to help out the local families with cancer issues and housefires and sick children. You get an overall community population of 1,000, max, who can raise $5,000, $8,000, $17,000 for some needy neighbour. I don't know about you, but I hide myself in the bathroom and cry sometimes. I am that overwhelmed by the generosity.

There is something about knowing the community will take care of you, should the need arise, that generates great peace of mind. You will not go hungry, your house will be rebuilt, your accommodation at the hotel will be paid near the big city hospital where your child is so sick. And hell if you need to be buried, that will be taken care of too.

It is a dying way of life, I am very well aware of that. But there is a lot to be learned here in these outport communities about a GNP that can't be measured, it is so completely off the charts.

I have never in my life been surrounded by so much happiness. It has nothing to do with material wealth or possessions but everything to do with contentment and a certainty that no finer place on earth exists.

Happy Teens

Teens happiest people in Canada

So said the headline and in hanging out with the grandgirl who will be sixteen this year, I've observed her happiness and the happiness of her friends.

It has astonished me. When I recall my teenage angst, and my daughters' for that matter, she presents a far different picture than ours.

Moodiness is rare. She has a load of friends and they all hang together in a large group. Most evident amongst them all is their marvellous sense of humour, how relaxed they are, how accommodating and inclusive they are of older and younger people, how engaged both politically and environmentally. How talented and versatile they are and how spontaneously they will perform a skit, or dance or hug and comfort each other .

I thought this was all limited to her good fortune, her sunny nature and that of her friends whom I should mention are of both genders and all ethnicities.

Until I read this:

In fact, 96 per cent of Canadians aged 12 to 19 reported they were highly satisfied with life in 2009. That's compared to 94 per cent of teens who reported either being satisfied or very satisfied with their lives in 2008. Each year the Canadian Community Health Survey asks Canadians to rank their life satisfaction, and the data shows that teens are getting more satisfied every year.

And this:

According to the experts, teens are happy because their parents (the baby boomers and gen Xers) are really good at being moms and dads. These parents have put a ton of resources into kids, from school and extracurricular programs, to counsellors and sport and recreation opportunities.

Read more about it here.

This more than anything I've read in the last while gives me hope - the real kind. These kids are all aware of the mess we're leaving them and they're still happy!

Gee, it makes me want to start all over again!
Wait!
Nah!

My Rules of Life---Part Seven

ACCEPTANCE

I used to struggle with just about everything and anyone given a small difference in basic philosophy or principle or possession. There was a lot of fear around the unknown, around perceived differences between you and me. The worst inner battle would come around circumstances. Why did you seem to have it so easy and I would be demented from trying to make ends meet. Life was always so unfair.


I was in the habit of always comparing my insides with your outsides. I'd see you so lovely and confident and think, I could be so much more given your looks and your brains and your relationship and your career and even your car. Life was tinged with an air of dissatisfaction. I'd bring an air of judgement and condemnation to any place, person or event I didn't quite approve of. For whatever reason.



There was never enough of this world for me. If I could have slightly more, then life would be a whole lot better.

I little realized that there would never be enough. Happiness, for me, I learned, was a completely inside job. I could never find it out there. It was in that indefinable space within.

And how did I find it? Through a long process of tearing down every faulty tenet of belief I had held so dear and letting go of all the preconceived notions of how I thought the world, with me in it, functioned.

I had to start with accepting myself exactly as I was in the very moment of now. It was never about the money or the wardrobe or the stuff. It was about who I was. I needed to find that. And I think I did. I had to accept the changes that happened to me. It was okay to change. Nothing was written in stone about my life. I could move through it, I could create it day to day. I could write. I could dream. I could read the books I wanted to read. And re-read them. I could shamelessly like old black and white movies.

But the other side of that was I had to accept you as you were as well, disliking the old B&W's and hating Jane Austen and really enjoying your trumpet. That was absolutely fine too. And I had to really mean it. I had to accept your wealth or your fame and not be intimidated or envious of it. I needed to wish you well in everything. I had to let go of the desire to change you. You were exactly as you were meant to be too. You see, I used to get acceptance and approval mixed up. I thought they were one and the same thing. But they're not.



And I'm still learning and still slide a little backwards on this acceptance business from time to time. But my whole life has substantially improved as a result.

Happiness is an inside job

Picture is of the boats on a beach at sunset not too far from where I live.

You know what? I’ve come to the conclusion that most worries and anxieties never ever happen if we don’t pay too much attention to them. If we do pay an inordinate amount of attention I think there is something about the laws of attraction that actualizes the worry for us. A subconscious willingness for the dreaded event to happen – the husband to leave, the money to be gone, the job to disintegrate.

“If only” is the mantra of those who believe that they can’t create their own happiness from within.

If only the kids were grown, if only I was retired, if only he didn’t drink so much, if only she’d lose weight, if only she wasn’t on my case so much, if only the mortgage was paid, if only I could get that Mercedes, if only I could have that big house in the burbs.

I was thinking of a good friend of mine, A, who never seems to be happy. She’s a lovely woman, from my neck of the woods back home. Generous to a fault, puts her money where her mouth is politically, socially very aware. But never, ever happy.

Her mother died when she was nine and she took care of her father and younger siblings and became a teacher. She had a doomed love affair in Ireland. He went off to be a priest and subsequently it didn’t agree with him and he left the priesthood and married someone else. By that stage she had long moved to Toronto and had married a second best. She had three children in three years, a pair of twins following a singleton. Husband was an abusive alcoholic and she left him.

A raised the kids by herself with the help of friends. She‘s the type of person that everyone loves. A brilliant pianist and wonderful conversationalist, active politically, a committed feminist.

When the kids were in their early teens she was at an Irish party and who should walk in but her old love, H. He was a visiting lecturer at U of T. Their love was reignited and within a year he had left his wife and four kids in Ireland and moved to Canada to marry her.

That would make A happy, yes? Well, no. His youngest was still very young so H would spend Christmases and part of the summer in Ireland (staying with his ex-wife). That didn’t make A happy. She felt she deserved all of him. She understood about the kids but thought they should come to him for the holidays. He wanted to be there in his children’s home to give them what they were missing during the year.

This, to me, was the classic example of everyone putting themselves out to make others happy with no one happy as a result.

In the past few years H has been diagnosed with a slow terminal illness and A is now worried about money and the fact that her kids are now grown and have moved off to other continents doing amazing work. She had raised them as socially aware, compassionate world citizens. She had hoped the kids would be around her forever, geographically speaking. A has got a great job, so does H, they have loads of money. But not in her mind.

I came to the conclusion that no matter what happens, A will never be happy.

Like a lot of others. The classic case of always feeling there is something missing. Like the enlightened priest said about confessions:

Isn’t it odd, he said, that when a prostitute comes to the confessional all she can talk about is God and when a priest comes in all he can talk about is sex?

What would make you happy? My ex-husband said to me, way back in the day, I gave you everything you ever wanted: a daughter, a house, a dog and a piano. And you’re still not happy. And he was right.

I still had to grow up then and learn a lot of life lessons that were painful But it is only through pain we grow and I know for sure we can’t skip around it to do that, but we have to walk through it.

How can you be happy, they now say to me. You live alone, you must be sad there is no one there to share your life.

I’m very happy, I say, if HE shows up, all well and good. But meanwhile there’s a life to be lived, and it’s my one and only wild and precious one so I’m going to live it. I make a choice to be happy every morning.

And it’s got nothing to do with my kids or my house or my stuff or my car or my other. But everything to do with how I’m feeling about ME today. And if I’m not feeling that good about me I’d better take a good long hard look at myself and fix what’s ailing me.