How I lost my innocence

For some reason, I knew that traveling around Australia was going to be the breaking point for me. Perhaps that’s why I left 12 years ago – to avoid the mantle of responsibility.

I’ve traveled around little pockets of the world, but I didn’t see how its existence was my concern. It existed before me. It was doing its thing without any interference from me. I was just taking a look.

I’ve heard the stereotypes about Australia. The legend of Steve Irwin. The horror of our creepy crawlies. The wonder of Kylie. Aussie girls rule. Oh, and aren’t we a racist lot?

I keep trying to pin point the exact moment everything fell apart. The sudden jolt of awareness that shifted my perspective and destroyed my unadulterated joy in shopping, in music, in eating, in driving in a car, in relationships, in the meaning of life and the purpose of my existence.

Of course, there is not just one point… the more I look at it, I can see the seed being sown some 20 years before. The seed has just outgrown its case and needed a different nutrient for its growth.

About two months ago, I read an essay written by Edmund Burke. In it, I read these words

‘society is indeed a contract …. It is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all art; a partnership in all virtue, and in all perfection..... each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world…..’

I threw the book down. I felt my head burning. I turned to my partner and started yelling obscenities because I felt abused, robbed, shocked and outraged.

I was reading Burke because C.W. Parkin wrote ‘Burke … believes that the world is a unity, that society, for all its complexity, its heights and depths, forms part of a harmony of nature.’

I’m researching members of the different educational disciplines who view our world through the perspective of unity.

A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot
cure. ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Burke’s words horrified me. To my way of thinking, it was inferring that the unwritten contract, that I was even unaware of, existed between me and the society I was, errr, mostly a bored, and at most, a disdainful observer and occasional mumble-complainer.

Me? In a contract with society? A relationship existed between us? An unwritten contract? Something that was just a given? Passed on from generation to generation? Why didn’t somebody spell this out to me? I spoke to my mother, and do you know what she said?

‘I don’t understand what you mean. If its not a written contract, its not worth the paper its written on. You can’t even tear it up. You’re talking tommy rot and you’ve been taken for a ride.’

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. ~Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum


I look at her with a feeling of doom, I take a breath, and I explain the idea of an unwritten contract in words I hope she will understand. The ‘taking for granted’ of certain things in personal relationships. The unspoken rules in relationships governing mother and child, father and son, mate and mate’s girlfriend. Maybe we don’t speak about so often, and usually its not written down, but the ‘rules’ exist. The contract between you and your spouse, or you and your parents exist weather its written or not.

And the idea of validating an unwritten contract between myself and society just hadn’t occurred to me before.

It knocked my socks off.

If your eyes are open, and you suddenly see what you couldn’t before, do you just ignore it and keep doing what you were doing before, or do you throw in the towel and stand up to the line?

Throw in the towel of ignorance is what.

Stand up to the line of responsibility is what.

It reminded me of the moment I knew, for sure, that I was pregnant. I’d never liked children and thought of them as repulsive little snot filled terrorists. But when the double stroke glowed that vomit inducing pale pink, there wasn’t, for me, a moment to contemplate ‘ignoring it’. I couldn’t. My life changed for ever. My attitude changed for ever. I could no longer be as selfish as I was. It was a foul swing at my short sighted selfishness and cured me of some stupidity. But it was tough at the time. I felt I’d ridden up against a brick wall.

Now it seems I’m ready to go the next step into the wider world. Me and society.

Stepping up to the line. Accepting responsibility for my half of the contract.

I’m still pulling at the bit. I’m still trying to find the balance between my sense of duty to what I feel I have discovered and just wanting to toss it all aside and live in Thailand somewhere getting massages and swimming in pristine waters… What am I doing? Why do I care?
And this brings us back to the first seed, and the beginning of everything.

I was 14 when I was left with my grandparents for a holiday. Two weeks later, my step mother calls me and tells me over the phone that now I’m living with my grandparents.

The grand illusion of childhood is that your parents, no matter what they do, are right and good and, this is important, know what they are doing. That is, that they are conscious of what they are doing.

We all know that we don’t know what we are doing, but a child probably feels safer if they believe we are some sort of semi-god.

All of us suffer disillusionment in stages we’re not conscious of, or in one giant dive.

I couldn’t maintain the illusion any more. I lay in my fold up bed in the lounge of my grandparent’s house and bit by bit, all of the repressed information I had about my parents burst upon me in a flood.

The one thing I judged them on, and am still their greatest critic, is their lack of responsibility. So, of course, if I judge another for not being responsible, how, if I am faced with information that increases my responsibility to the world, can I ignore it?

For me, its impossible.

So here I am. Signing, in my own way, my side of the unwritten contract between me and society.

I wonder if society knows what it has unleashed?

I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer.... I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. ~Richard Phillips Feynman

My secret

I have a plan.

A plan to shock and shift the values in our society.

I am researching the commons in our unity. The fabrications, the illusions, the positives, the negatives.

When I have a handful of strings from the diversity of thought from systems like politics, economics, psychologists, scientists, I will draw them together and weave a strong rope.

These strings will represent the strong undercurrent of sweeping social change I can feel emerging with every beat of my heart.

We will focus our energies on the things we have in common.

- Our belief in making decisions based on our long term happiness over short term pleasure

- Our commitment to understanding our responsibility in our position of affluence

- Our belief in living our ‘ideals’ – authenticity

- Our commitment to humanities future through caring for and forging stronger, supportive relationships to our children

- Our understanding of the environmental crisis we are facing with countries such as India and China desiring to consume as much as we do, and understanding our entire system needs overhauling if we are to survive

Take a look at www.wellbeingmanifesto.net for more ideas.

Why?

Because we are ugly. We are superficial. We are disillusioned. We are depressed. We are alcoholics. We are drug addicts. We don’t care. We try retail therapy. We try binge drinking. We try buying more. We numb our brain with TV, computers, sex, romance, music and more shopping. We try screaming. We try not giving a damn. We try to blind ourselves with the flag. We try to drink more. We are angry. We are sad. We can’t believe it . We hate life. We are hurt. We can’t go on. We go missing. We want to escape. We are chained. We are hypnotized by the TV telling us that we must be young, pretty/handsome, rich. People disappoint us. Politicians disappoint us. We laugh so as not to cry. That we must buy this car, this mobile, this hairstyle, this magazine. We try divorce, we try to be single, we try to suicide. We hate our friends and our families. We think the world sucks.

And it does. It really does.

The only way to stop it, is for you to stop it. The only way.

Stop the lies, the deceit, the hurt in your own soul. Turn off the TV. Use your internet time with thought instead of feeling ‘trapped’ by it. Its all up to you.

And I believe in the power of you. I believe it, because the alternative is too terrible for me contemplate. I am blind. Blinded by my faith in humanity. In its ability to grow and develop and learn from its mistakes.

And all it takes, is for you to believe too. And then, I am a we. And we, together, can make a difference.

Disguises

Clothes

Basically clothes help to disguise or highlight aspects of your personality. I felt my style changing in my latter teenage years. I knew I was different. I didn’t like the way the others behaved. I didn’t like their fundamental lack of grit. They seemed like marshmellow puffs. I was different. I didn’t fit in with them and I wanted to mark my difference. I didn’t like their soft hair, I didn’t like their neat clothes and I didn’t like their preordained existence.

Though nobody would hear me shouting about it. I didn’t discuss my thoughts with any of them. So I put on a pair of red sneakers, I changed one shoe lace to green, I didn’t pair my socks, I wore baggy coloured pants, loose ripped or stained tops. I coloured my hair and eventually put super glue in it to hold it off my face.

People at school still treated me the same. I was just a bit wacky. But sometimes cars slowed down and boys yelled obscene things to me, or grannies would hold their purses tighter as I walked passed or children would ask their mothers what had that boy done to his hair?

It was all the same to me. I was me. I could feel comfortable without thinking about what the rest of the teenage world expected of me. I had stated with my abdication that I wasn’t in the running for Miss Teen America.

Those clothes and my hair gave me a shield. I was an unknown entity. I was capable of anything, I was an individual who said fuck you to all the crap about looking good for boys, about walking on the trodden paths, about agreeing to the society I was living it. Because I didn’t like what I saw. Abuse, lies, dishonesty, murder, transgressions, violence, drugs, evil, evil, evil. And I wasn’t going to take it. I was not going to sit here and drink wine to this world and eat bread to our future or past. I felt that new changes needed to be implemented before I ever wanted to associate myself with the rest of humanity.