grown up too fast
I remember Gary Coleman’s
character, Arnold, in Different Strokes once said “I don’t want to grow up...”. A line that has stuck with me over decades,
albeit for no particular reason.
Recently I have been affectionately nicknamed Peter Pan and it has got
me thinking... “Is my generation in the Age of Worry John Mayer beautifully
sung about?”
Am I, like Peter Pan, refusing to
grow up, metaphorically, of course? I
mean, I am constantly trying to figure out the world as it changes every day;
lovers turn to bitter enemies, friends to foes, partners face-off in ugly
lawsuits. It is indeed a dangerous and
scary world out there. I remember once
overhearing a train conversation when a young man said “I don’t want to get
married cuz I don’t want to get divorced...” and that was shocking. He was worrying about an ending before even
starting the journey. I recently read an
article about some traits of unhappy people and the common thread with most of
the traits was the burden of worrying.
Unhappy people worry a lot and in most cases unnecessarily.
This generation, in my opinion,
is constantly paranoid. The degrees of
paranoia vary but we are worried about everything. Our worries send us to bed and ironically our
worries wake us up and chase us out of our houses. Our worries make us apply for loans we can
ill afford to repay, mortgages we avoid to look at and so on. Our worries send children to school for and
‘education’ we fear may corrupt their views on the world but do so nonetheless
for fear of them being left behind in this factory conveyor belt called
life. Our worries keep us in
relationships long after their expiry dates afraid of being ‘alone’ and being
happy with just that. Worrying we will
be broke and downtrodden, we apply for jobs we wished never existed but we turn up anyway worried to be
reprimanded and sacked.
On a wider community level we
worry about the ozone layer, climate change, wars, diseases, hunger, poverty,
slavery, sexism, racism, child trafficking, deforestation, animal rights, human
and now I’m literally afraid if I continue listing I would have added a new
worry on your ‘list of worries’ so I’ll stop with the listing; but you can
imagine that our waking moments must be spent in mental rooms choking on the
fumes of worry and paranoia.
In all fairness to this
generation we have inherited some of the worries from our parents. They worried about what kind of members of
society they’d be raising and channeled us towards paths they deemed fit and
development and we in turn will certainly pick the baton and continue the
vicious cycle of worry. We will worry
for our own offspring; we would worry about cloud storage accounts being
hacked, about religious extremists, revenge porn, the effects of social media on
physical human interaction and our children’s safeties online, the incurable
diseases of HIV/AIDS, cancer and Ebola.
In spite of this scary storm of
despair, let’s look less at the things we can’t help and focus on the things we
can help in the here and now; the sun, the birds and trees; the faces and
smiles of children and our loved ones.
We can chose to spend more time in the present.
Worry less...
Adieu!
