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views45 Life Lessons... that only 2% of the world can heed
By Gringette in Beirut, Thursday, November 11, 2010, 2 commentsMy mom sent me a chain email yesterday. It was a powerpoint file that contained two to three little tidbits of “life advice” on each slide. The backgrounds were all beautiful scenes of countrysides buried in snow—hence the title, “snow talks.” Don’t know if you’ve seen it.
This struck me as quite odd – no, I’ll be honest, completely bizarre-- because in all the years that my mother and I have communicated via email (including all of those when I lived in the same house/state/country as she did), I cannot remember a single chain email. Especially one of this ilk: the feel good Thomas Kinkade shows you the true secrets of life variety.
So of course I opened it up thinking perhaps it would have something deep and/or uniquely hilarious that had given my brilliant mother cause for contemplation or at least a good laugh. And I’m not saying I don’t appreciate a good snow scene but… you can imagine my surprise when I opened it up and there was nothing but feel good sayings among drifts and drifts of white powder. Here are a few of them:
1. Life isn’t fair, but its still good.
2. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
3. Save for retirement, starting with your first paycheck
4. Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger
5. No one is in charge of your happiness but you
6. Frame every so called disaster with “in five years, will this matter?”
I want to create a winter wonderland slide show saying things like:
1. “Life isn’t fair IN OTHER COUNTRIES. Start pressuring your government to remove banana subsidies”
2. “Life is too short to occupy other nations; free Palestine and Tibet,”
3. “Instead of saving all your extra money for retirement, buy a flock of geese from Heifer International and feed a village.”
No one is in charge of your happiness except for you. And the government, if you happen to be a citizen of North Korea. Or Bhutan (but in a good way; their government actually has a ministry that measures National Happiness).
I mean, in five years, will the volcano eruption in Indonesia matter to those living underneath it??! Is a life after the rest of your family perished in Genocide really something that could make you stronger just because it didn’t kill you? Or even, to bring it to the national scale, is the death of a loved one something that would make you stronger if it doesn’t kill you? Come on.
I KNOW HOW GRANOLA THAT SOUNDS. Believe me, I do. But I also couldn’t help thinking it; it was my true and honest reaction upon reading this forward. Living in Iraq – and yes, I am a stuck up elite Westerner living in wealth and opulence here – makes these pithy little Life Lessons just seem shifty, like they are grasping at some sort of Truth but reaching in the exact opposite direction. And yes I guess its designed for a western audience, and yes I shouldn’t make EVERYTHING so serious and political, and yes yes yes.
But still. I think there is a degree of damage that can be avoided by sweeping out this smug self-confirming sort of chain junk and ushering in some critique of the way the world (and not just our respective corners of it) REALLY is. Or just leave the space empty, if nothing else.
I had a Religion teacher at University who, despite my personal disagreements with her own self-image, taught me one fundamental thing: never measure someone else’s pain. How about that one? I don’t care if it’s a stomach ache or a heartache or a life of depression – my pain threshold, my measurement stick of anguish does not follow the same scale as anyone else’s. Never will I attempt to quantify someone else’s suffering.
To be sure, there were some decent ones in there as well:
1. Its OK to let your Children see you cry (so true. Its good for them!)
2. Don’t compare your life to others; you have no idea what battles they are fighting (that’s what I’m sayin’).
3. Its OK to get mad at God. He can handle it (and even if he couldn’t, he deserves it).
Its hard for me to be so critical of this because my mother is truly the smartest person I know. And the coolest. And the sole soul who is responsible for making me who I am today. But even brilliant moms can be carried away by beautiful panoramas and the romance of light dancing on icicles. I don’t really know how to tell her how I feel about this. My guess is that she will read this blog and I wont have to.
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2 Comments
I love, love, love this!!
I get so frustrated with people who can only offer empty cliched comments in response to life and like to pretend that life is awesome. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one actually seeing and accepting the reality that life in general just plain sucks. Sure I can have good attitude about it and attempt to see the lessons in the hardships, but for once I just want someone to say life on Earth is crap, and to put a sprititual twist on it, and because of this fact its even clearer that we aren't meant for this world.
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