It Gets Better

I bow deeply to the “It Gets Better” campaign in that keeping hope alive can be the pivot point for actual change to occur.  There are far too many clichés that would have us believe that “High school is the best time of your life”.  So much so that as a society we seem to glamorize the binge drinking raves, sexting habits and video chat roulette — not when it comes to our own children of course but look around in the papers, tele and film.  Highschool — It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

I laughed and still remember the quote from a recent episode of Modern Family when mother of three Claire declared to the fourth wall ” Your kids don’t need to know who you were before you had them, they need know who you wish you were and they need to try to live up to that person.  They are gonna fall short!  But better they fall short of the fake you than the real you. ” (4:10  http://abc.go.com/watch/modern-family/SH559066/VD5588745/the-kiss)

In truth, I think its important to be honest with our kids — for me that started with not promoting Santa Claus as a super hero and continues as I explain to my kids that the choices I made in the young and stupid years don’t have to be the same ones they make on the road to their own enlightenment (lighter living.)

I was speaking with a gifted person this week who is struggling in the trap of a conditioned mind habit (addiction by any other name would still smell as OCD) and he said “It’s not getting any easier.”  I know what its like to work long and hard with very little tangible results to show for your efforts so from my heart I replied “You may practice this teaching every week for the rest of your life and if it never gets any easier you can be so grateful and blessed that it never got any worse either.”  And somehow in the moment, that made perfect sense within a disordered world.

As the Buddha is often quoted to say “Everything changes, nothing remains without change.”  And in this sense it is absolutely true that — It Does Get Better.  When I was a teenager my step-father, Howard, found me one afternoon sulking in the cellar.  Not unusual since my bedroom was in the basement and high school for me was all about drama and tears.  In this instance a boyfriend had just broken up with me and I was crying big puddles.  I remember he stood in the doorway with his carpenter tool belt slung over his shoulder and a pack of cigarettes in his hand and said … “Don’t worry Lippy.” which was my nickname and a shaggy dog story for another time, “This pain that you are feeling now sucks.  But you will get over him.  And one day you are going to meet another boy and fall in love.”  He smiled at me and I smiled back and then he added, ” And one day he’ll dump you too.”  In his own jewish-buddha-nature-dark-humor-way, How was telling me that everything changes.

My point being, not that I ever really have a point to make when I am on my virtual street corner looking up at the signposts … that while it is wonderful to let our youth know that things do and will get better … we may also want to curb our enthusiasm and let them know that when the jocks and bullies, cheerleaders and nerds are long since only alive in our nightmares (you know the ones where we hear the bell and realize we are naked in the classroom, and there is a test that we haven’t studied for in a class that we ditched all year) then there will be new challenges like foreclosures, divorce, illness and a whole new flavor of addiction that we didn’t even dream about in our glory days.  However, all of this whatever it is WILL CHANGE.  Perhaps at glacial speed — which I did look up this week is typically less than one foot a day — but one foot is all we need to move us from where we stand to a place we have never stood before.