Release

I read a short story over the last two days about buried memories (Beyond What Words Can Capture).  The longer I live, of course, statistically the more memories there are that get buried.  The story was about memories that get buried because they were so painful, and the point of the story was to talk about them so that katharsis would take place.

I know about painful memories.  I have more than a few.  They come from every area of life - education, religion, parenting, death, companionship, family, and human relations in general.  These are not mere disappointments, they caused great disruption and emotional upheaval.  If I think of them all at one time, I feel like a complete failure.

Fortunately, the events took place over a number of years, in different decades of my life.  I am not here to say that these events were handled properly or even that my reactions were noble.  I am only here to say that I acknowledge that great pain happens in life, and in order to go on, burying all or portions of a memory of an event helps in allowing good to replace the great failures.

One of the themes of the story was to show that finding a friend to help in bringing meaning to unfortunate events is so necessary in moving forward.  I look back at my intense traumas and see that that was true for me.  Without friends in just the right places at just the right moments, the outcome and direction of my life could have been different.

We all need nudges to move on.  We all need to enjoy our lives.  In one way of looking at life, we all need to bury portions of our difficult and intense disturbances.  Then we can release a modified version of ourselves to enjoy new life, that is, life from the point of recovery of such an event.  These days, that's what I am all about.  Life changes from drudgery to enjoyment when I practice that principle.

Working on it

Perhaps I don't understand human dynamics as I should.  I have to deal with young adults all the time - you know, the group called the Millennials.  I hear all the time that they feel like they are an entitled group.  I guess I don't understand that word well enough because I don't really see the characteristic, as I understand it, applying to the group as a whole.  I have read the occasional article about this group, so I have seen some of their expectations and likes and dislikes that writers think they have.  What I see and what I read sometimes match, but mostly not.

Their is one characteristic that seems to apply to more than 50% of the ones I know, though.  Many of the ones in this group resist wanting to become adults in the area of responsibility and fallout from irresponsibility.  I call it the Peter Pan effect.  They want to live, it seems, in Never Never Land where every episode of life ends nicely and has tidy effects regardless of how bad the behavior is in the episode.

Eventually, they learn there is no Tinkerbell, no Peter Pan, no Captain Hook, and no pixie dust.  But is seems that the passage from age 18 to around 32 is a hard knocks university for them.  They have to learn that the raw, overly used expletives in their speech have ramifications.  People don't accept what they say as having moral value or social value.  Their use of many expletives marks their generation's speech, but it doesn't leave people feeling good after they have finished speaking.  

They have to learn that virtual friends are mostly friends that have images, but no real substance to their character.  The images are all about the "selfie" taken for a profile picture, not about learning from each other how to live together.  So they live separately behind good profiles that don't match the real person behind the profile.  Encounters with the real people behind the profile leave them feeling very dissatisfied and unfulfilled.

They also have to learn that people who make plans but don't keep them create the domino effect, a new concept to them apparently.  Not keeping appointments as they have said they would really does alienate acquaintances and friends.  The have to learn that appreciation of friendship is a designation to be earned, not assigned to them automatically.

Somewhere around age 32, it seems that some type of awareness finally creeps in that the world really does have episodes that don't end nicely and tidily and that bad behavior really does have a negative cumulative effect on their surroundings.  As to why it takes about a decade and a half for them to gain that awareness is the particular human dynamic I don't understand.  But, I'm working on that.