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“Fate, destiny, luck... the prisons of man. People pass the time enjoying the choices they provide... coffee or tea, right or left - as if it matters. We're all just spinning on the wheel. There's but one way to keep off the wheel. It's not youth, beauty or true love. I know how to stay off the wheel. I control my fate. I have survived because I know one must be willing to destroy anyone, anything - even the things you love - to keep the gods in check.”
— Jessica Lange as Elsa Mars, in "American Horror Story: Freak Show" (Episode 6, "Bullseye")
Doesn't the above quote, however horrific, resonate with the time and tide of our times? It comes from a fictional character, dreamt up for an anthology horror series about a 1950s travelling freak show. But it feels fitting for our times.
In our maniacal obsession for the survival of the status quo, we have turned the world into one of fear. The light of humanity peers down at us from the end of a very long, dark tunnel, leaving a frightful perspective that labels difference as freakish - to be shunned, abhorred, annihilated. And being inhuman to survive (to "keep the gods in check" as Elsa Mars of the freak show would put it) means making it out without our humanity.
Thus today we are a humanity living in a despoiled home-world, whiling away its twilight hours on a planet so ecologically devastated it may never recover. The elevated institutions we elect to run our lives feature political characters shovelling exposition at each other like some dreary, esoteric art-house movie, and a few of those characters have no character to speak of: they're mouthpieces for political-babble and philosophical debate. So separated are they from life on the ground, there is no real feeling for the lives behind the numbers they crunch and the fists they punch.
In modern societies today we concentrate on "doing, achieving" and having" - like a brain on cannabis, we've become faster in process, but smaller in forethought. We rarely focus on a compassionate process to help the well-being of our minds successfully cope with the harsh impact of modern living. But even our most compassionate processes have been abused. Along with politics, poverty and culture, religion is often cited as a major source of conflict throughout the world. We use religious beliefs to mistreat each other and disavow differing beliefs. We allow scriptures to mire us in controversy, condemnation or just the plain creepy. While any movement that promotes peaceful and productive interactions between religious traditions is often ignored.
So, we are a humanity growing in billions, yet more alone than ever, holding on to a life so entombed in graves of injustice and inhumanity it has numbed the very roots of our feelings. We are fields were emotions no longer grow. We are a human race blind to the beauty above, below and all around us, so tightly bound are we to our historic feuds. What we choose to find endearing or irritating will depend on our affinity for style - and sometimes the latest styles can make scarecrows out of saints, or more than not, saints out of scarecrows.
In this, and many, maddening ways we are a humanity sometimes at odds with life. We rarely tell its story right, or do it justice. Its tactile beauty isn't matched by our sense of composition. Often our lives just illustrate its screenplay, as though this were all some dress rehearsal for the embodied spirit, and not the real thing.
And yet life is still an impressive, at times an astonishing play that overwhelms us to the point where our usual objections to humanity's works melt away. There is something pure and powerful about us. About the way we pick ourselves up and bounce back as a team. Where separated from everything that defines us, from loved ones, personal histories and culture, we can still bridge that space to our hearts to instil the hope of another day.
We are a people who know that charity is more than just throwing money at a cause. In our search to cope with a life that is often stressful and hard, we know developing compassion for oneself and others can help us face up to and win through the hardship, and find a sense of inner peace. We know that the moment we realise the source of our spirit is sitting in the temple of every human body and that a different version of God lies within each individual, when we stand in reverence before every human being and see God in them, in that moment we will find ourselves free to know what it is to be truly human.
Only then will we know we are each other's canvas. Sketched between our basic human desires for home, for family, for continuity of bloodline and culture, and our basic human fears of separation and isolation, our brush-strokes coloured with similar expressions of vulnerability to loneliness and doubt. We will realise we are ghosts, writing out messages to the living in the dust: individual human letters, using the same alphabet of the soul.
Always wanting to go beyond the physical to the heart, we are dazzling vistas that are less spaces than mind-spaces, built on tearful separations and reconciliation. We are spectacular metaphors when we come together for beauty, for dignity when the people we value are taken from us by death, illness, or unbridgeable distance, for mercy to those who experience the same. Where the anguish of goodbye drives everything we try to do, while realising that similar feelings drive the rest of our species, too.
Where hidden inside us is a kaleidoscope of colours and shapes, of experiences of happiness, delight, and bliss. Of bodies that fit with each other like a thought unsheathed in a mind, like a sword sheathed in a scabbard. Of being made both of what is naked and invisible to the eye, of open roads and deeper, darker valleys.
Of unhealthy thoughts and actions, but also the awareness to develop the self-control necessary to release them. Of the deep, abiding sadness or worthlessness that can infiltrate and affect every aspect of our being, but also the courage to chase its dark away. We are the vehicles of our death and the source of our well-being. And as changeable as we are, we still feel hurt when the things we identify with and attach ourselves to inevitably change.
We are a miraculous survival story in which the future of humanity is always at stake, and where suffering is linked to triumph and transcendence. And as we grow, we become in turn manifestations and personifications. We are layers of being, global villages, cities of souls, of the physical, subtle and causal. We are a body of conscious minds, walkers in the region of thoughts and feelings. We are contents that remain largely unconscious, floating beyond the mind.
We are built from the food we eat, nourished by the energy of physical life, charged by the energy of our thoughts, and enlightened by our intellect. We are driven by joyful connections to a collective mind, wanting to be part of a tribe, and yet at the same time fighting to be equally individual from its commands. We are ants on a hill who see valour in gut feeling and blind faith, where our most stirring sequences are less about what we do, and more about what our actions mean to us, and to others.
We are ants who are aware, and fear, the passing of time. Time is something we all fear on the hill. Time is everything. There's a ticking clock governing every aspect of existence, from the global to the familial. Every act by every human being is an act of defiance, born of a wish to rage against the dying of the light.
But we also instinctively know that time is nothing but perception. What passes is not time but us: and we whittle away our time with the stories we tell, to educate, elucidate and entertain. Stories to make us better understand ourselves. Of purpose. Of life. Of getting from the why to the how.
How it's funny that as humans we search for a sole purpose, not realising that purpose may manifest in a number of different and unorthodox ways. One person's beauty is another's madness, and sometimes there has to be acceptance at either end for life to peacefully coexist.
How if we want to discover who people really are and what they actually believe, we should ignore their gender, race, sexuality, or position in life, and ignore what they profess to believe, too. We should focus instead on how they treat others. That will tell you everything about them you need to know.
Or how the best advice is the simplest: develop and commit to healthy habits, surround yourself with people that will build you up, and never let your past dictate your future. Be nice to people. Always have a passion in life. And trust you're never to old to learn or try something new.
Or how we are so preoccupied with happiness, but ignore how sad it can make us. How between the books, seminars and blogs, the study of how to make a happy life is practically its own genre, but happiness-chasing can be toxic unless you accept it's okay to be sad sometimes.
How adulthood is a myth; nobody else knows what they're doing, and the people who run things are generally winging it as well.
How relationships need to be complimentary to your happiness not central to it.
How the fight to improve your life is never ending, and is ALWAYS worth it.
How love needs two of something to survive.
How life is there to be lived.
Because the point to this wheel of humanity that turns in life is not to stay off it, as the Elsa Mars of this world would have it. It's knowing how to enjoy the ride.
Yours in love,
