A Lament for the Living

Image by Europeana

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TW: explicit references to sexual violence, and contains distressing language and imagery. Please read with care.

We’ve lost our way as a society.

A malady stretching across the globe.

We’re overworked, underpaid, angry, depressed, stressed, and lonely.

Life hasn’t worked out how we thought it would.

We haven’t become the people we imagined we would be.

So we keep striving, keep working, keep trying to focus.

Then we crash, burn, have some kind of blow-out, berate ourselves, hate ourselves...

and try again.

We’ve built ‘social’ systems that rely on the misrepresentation of who we are,

algorithms designed to profit from our inability to be real,

to disengage,

to be still,

present,

and

to let go of the lie.

Let’s call them what they are: multi-million-dollar businesses that feed on our collective inability to bear the truth of life.

The same businesses responsible for stealing our children’s childhoods and, at an alarming and increasing rate, their lives.

And so we reach, desperately for something, anything, that will numb the pain.

Loneliness and despair have frightening standards that many of us won’t admit.

It doesn’t matter how we consume it or how long we wait in line to buy it,

if it makes us forget, even for a moment, it seems worth it.

At least, it did to me...at the time.

Every day our minds are flooded with unimaginable despair:

war, famine, kidnappings, threat.

We rape each other and abuse our children.

And then we point fingers and say, “Not us.”

We divide and blame as if we are different.

We divide and blame.

As if we are different.

We are subjected to daily reminders that everything we believed to be true,

about how we function together, is crumbling.

We are being fundamentally let down by the people we not only expect but elect, and thus pay, to make crucial decisions for our wellbeing and our children’s futures.

We don’t trust the people paid to protect us in our hour of need.

We are tired.

Afraid.

Angry.

Resentful.

And so we keep scrolling.

It’s no wonder we’re finding ways to anaesthetise ourselves.

We buy things, or people, or places.

We try to attain them, introject them into the fibre of our being,

make them mean something about our own meaning.

We chase sensations that help us forget the ache underneath.

We give it a pill, a drink, a drag, a hit, a fuck, a suck.

We judge, gossip, deflect.

We ostracise and misrepresent.

We work aimlessly,

again and again,

to misunderstand one another.

We are failing each other on an unimaginable scale,

and failing ourselves.

We have completely misunderstood and forgotten that we are spiritual beings,

having a human experience.

And we live every day as if death only turns up at other people’s bedsides.

We carry on amid the chaos, pretending it’s outside us,

over there…somewhere.

So we make Plans.

Plans are for the future.

Plans are good.

We should all have Plans.

But on the back of every Plan is a clause in tiny print,

that no one bothers to read,

too focused on the illusion of control they think they’ve secured.

It simply states: “This plan will be deemed null and void at any given moment.”

We’ve built worlds we can’t survive in and called it progress.

We’ve mistaken connection for contact,

and worship for content.

And beneath all our striving,

something ancient is still reaching in us all,

not for more,

but for meaning.

I would call it God,

but I know some would stop listening.

So I’ll just call it the ache that won’t die,

the one that hums beneath the noise,

asking us to remember

what and who we are.