Monday

I was listening to a talk on YouTube and in the middle of it the woman went off on "mockery."  How people will find something they don't like and then do it to be funny, and it makes me think how pervasive this is now: politics, media, comments, facebook posts, twitter, etc...we are bombarded with it.  And irony has it's place, certainly, but it's so dominant right now.  And the thing is, all of this is passive and reactionary, which again has it's place (a small one), and it's taking over the building, and nothing changes.  Nothing happens (as far as change we say we want) when it's in charge.  We only react to blows, we don't change the circumstances that cause the blows in the first place by only complaining or mocking them.  It's not a place of power.  Power is action.  Power is in changing the circumstances, replacing the playing field, changing the rules of the game when they no longer work.

In that Hero's Journey genre thing (it's a circle-Romantic, Tragedy, Irony, Satire, Comedy, back to Romantic) from the point of view of hero and side-kick (I can't recall the term.)  It starts with 1) hero fights and wins; 2) hero fights and loses; 3) hero gives up, ineffectual; 4) there is no hero; 5) side kick is the hero.  I think.  It was a 10th grade English class, I'm a little rusty in my remembrance of it; I just remembered the side-kick character mattered in the cycle, this morning.  In that context, irony is giving up.  And again, there is a place for it, but it isn't gonna affect change (at least not very effectively.)

She says something about the mocking coming from the place of an outsider, that now wants to keep other people out...yeah.  And now everyone's keeping someone else out it seems.  I get it.  I really wanted to be "cool" (I'm still not, for the record) when I was younger, and picked up a lot of that negativity where you start to hate everything. (You know, the teenage, early 20's attitude.)  And I did make friends, I did find my tribe, but looking back on it, I think they accepted me in spite of my bad attitude, not because of it.  They tolerated it because they liked me.  And then I remember a specific moment where I decided I didn't want to be like that anymore, that it was pushing good things away from me, keeping them out of my life.  It took years to finally feel like I was free of it.  I still fall prey, but not as much, not as long.

If you don't practice any religion, or believe in an afterlife, or reincarnation; if you believe this is it, this is the whole burrito, why spend your limited time in mockery instead of living? Your life.  Finding something you love.  Something with meaning.  Something that moves you.  Something that causes you to act.  Something to want.  Make choices in your life rather than reacting to something someone (you probably don't even like) is throwing at you.  Why let them rule your life?  Just a thought. 

The world is waiting for you.