Who we are

I haven't hidden much on this blog, though I bounce between funny observations from my daily chaos and soulful renditions of my spiritual health. It's finally ocurred to me that that is my true character: this fragile, cataclysmic, emotional creature, and a jester-like reporter of prickled happines. People like me sometimes earn some non-complimentary terms: unstable, emotionally immature, suffereing Peter Pan syndrome, from poor impulse control, and other caustic and unhelpful descriptors. It can be difficult to remember that everyone who does (or might) use such phrases does so because they wish--in some way--for the freedom to be the type of child I remain. No one has called me names recently. But I feel dealing with truth is more effective than sheilding one's eyes and trying to live otherwise. Kindly spoke, I have an artistic and affective temperament.

There are some young teenagers in my life who are entering the whirlwind course of high school/parental/societal pressures. These are children on whom great hopes are pinned. They are their parent's reasons and redemption. They are tasked with doing what we "failed" to do ourselves. No matter how it is communicated and assured, they know. They carry with them the undone and the unborn. Here, in these developed countries especially, while we say we want them only "to be happy" this is no more true than the idea that college is "years away"--it is true as it is said, and untrue as it is lived. What we risk in this translation with these children is that they "fail" on both counts. They never accomplish what we truly gave them as tasks, and they never find how to create happiness and self-satisfaction in their lives.
What will it take to give them the freedom we truly want to? First, be truthful with ourselves, then forgive ourselves, then set ourselves free.