Living Dangerously
Friends, Romans, Countrymen…lend me your ears.
Being high is an experience a person who has never had it…never truly understands.
To them, it is an escape, a light hearted adventure full of lost boys and runaway girls. Like Alice, we tumble down the rabbit hole, giggling and screaming, and…hand in hand…into wonderland we go…
We were living dangerously…a romantic fade….full of neon lights, closed doors and the wisps of cigarette smoke slowly ascending above it all.
To them, our experience is beautiful. An enhanced reality.
If only they knew, the sudden emptiness, a random gust of wind…forcing open the doors to our darkness…that drives us to that bar…or to make that call. To hustle to a corner to light that cigarette.
What starts out as adventure…very innocent and free, often turns into despair….a creeping belief that ….this IS all there is.
A world that was once so full of colour, becomes that purple haze….and only those of us who have seen it know that it is no fantasy.
It is the end of fantasy.
When the waves recede, and we, the lucky ones, find ourselvcs…still standing, we fondly remember the wild parties, the crazy moments…but very quickly, we remember the downfall. The desperation. The neverending longing…to feel something new. To imagine. A longing that, thankfully, our habits could no longer numb away.
A need that brought us back to the shore, out from deep under water.
Our loved ones are so relieved by our recovery, our sobriety, we are afraid to tell them, the despair hasnt really gone anywhere. The emptiness, whose existence we have fully actualized, has now become a part of us. It is constant work, fighting the desperation. The loss of faith. The lack of belief.
But what does come back, is our ability to dream. Our ability to see beauty.
After my own experience with addictions, from smoking, to drinking to all those colours in the rainbow… I have found there is no real way to just leave them behind.
I worry about my friends…my family. I worry about the dark rooms they may be hiding, the same way I did. That they are lost in a way I cannot reach them…the same way, noone could reach me.
Someone who knew me all my life, said that they missed the old me. I was so brave…bold…was the word.
Now I seemed careful.
What they dont understand is that I am not being careful to protect myself. I am being careful to protect others who have not yet fallen beside me. Those who did, were caught up in the whirlwind we tended to wield around ourselves.
My ability to see everyone as equal…was a deceptive tint to my world view.
We are not equal.
Some of us…are not strong enough. Some of us LOVE more than others. Some of us will need attention…special attention. The kind of attention that holds someone’s hand before they jump out a window.
I want those of you who do not understand WHY we made those choices…why someone like me, made those choices…to know, you will never understand.
But do know, whether the person you are worried about is destined to be still standing at the end, or unable to tread that very deep water…they KNOW a pain, much deeper than you are experiencing watching them spiral. Watching them lose themselves.
It may look like a childlike, immature choice. But it is burdened with much maturity.
A Harvard professor lectured us once on Addiction, after a reading for a new play…
We are all addicted to something. Music. Food. People…Sex….we all have something we cannot live without.
Finding your way out of that tunnel…whatever it is you cannot live without….is simply a matter of inspiration and connection. But finding that…is not easy. And it is unique to every person.
The addict does not need to be MORE MATURE. We do not need to grow up. It is the growing up that got us here.
Instead, it is more worthwhile to find ways to be a child again.
To make mistakes fearlessly; to break things…innocently.
To play with others…to feel joy, pain, loss, anger with the lightness of a breeze…
To be focused on tomorrow….and not yesterday….and all the possibilities it brings.
Possibility is key.
Maturity in all its forms, trains us to believe that we can control the future. That a universal causality connects us all. I personally believe that at the heart of someone who is truly lost, is a sense that the world is totally random, and not in our control. That everything we have spent our entire life learning how to do, will make no difference at all in the end.
What an open ended statement. Where do you go from there?
To the bars…that’s where we go…or went…hopefully.
I am no Bible Thumper…but I do believe in fables. I think that there is something to be said about how humans complicate the simplest of lessons.
A stranger says to a group of people on a mountain,
“Let the children alone, and do not hinder them from coming to Me; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”
We then take everything he says, put it into a series of books, label them the TESTAMENT, and then millions of people are supposed to live only by these words for the rest of their life. To add insult to injury, we come up with a book like the catechism…with more rules, to live by. A guide on how to be a good person, have a reserved seat past the pearly gates and a neverending supply of PEACE. A checklist, we should fulfill every week, twice on sundays.
At the heart of all these ideas, is control. We believe we can control our spiritual fruit, our universe, through a series of random events, and activities.
Finding relief…or ways to cope with our failures to do so…to control everything, seems natural if this was a way to LIVE.
But that is the absolute opposite of being a child.
Maybe all that man on top that mountain was trying to tell us, was to not take life so seriously.
I try every day now, to make at least one attempt to do something child like….or fearless.
Willy Wonka said…,
We are the music makers…we are the dreamers of dreams.
Whether it is staring at the ocean and imagining a War of the Worlds-like scene — tossing ships up into the air, OR trying to see my own white whale emerge from the surface….OR dropping way too many marshmallows into a coffee cup knowing I shouldn’t have so many….being Silly is how I stay alive now.
As a thinker, it can be terrifying to observe the world.
And a thinker, most certainly, I am. And as an avid observer of humanity, I believe now that my role has made me biased. Pattern and eventuality are now my religion. I have somehow convinced myself that I see the truth. And that truth left me barren of hope…for the future. An endless sea of tragedy for our world, for our kind…led me down the road of numbness. A song of silence…quieting my nerves…and my worries…and matching the randomness I had observed, by casting aside any belief that what I do matters.
But the truth is…there is no ONE truth. No ONE belief. No ONE way.
And if I accept that, then spending most of my life thinking, seems to be a true waste of time. Dissecting life and searching for reason…
Maybe it is more important…to be part of it.
And that possibility turns my eyes away from the emptiness, which I cannot shed entirely…toward the idea that in its depths, the truth does not lie.
Just a thought.
-M