Hitting Bottom

Our lives begin in ignorance. We don’t know much and while we mature through childhood our ability to even think correctly is limited by brain development. This is why some current and now classic sitcoms, where the children are portrayed as the smart ones and the parents as egotistical idiots, have an overall harmful effect on society. Allowing children to pretend they are mature enough to make adult decisions is a way of grooming them to be manipulated by other adults not their parents.  

Parenting today is difficult and, in many ways, countercultural. Children need good boundaries. We as children needed good boundaries. Boundaries provide the safety necessary to allow children to play and grow at a pace consistent with their level of maturity.  

If we enter adulthood not having learned the important disciplines required to live independently, then we are set up to have disastrous relationships with other adults, especially anyone we agree to marry. On top of this we will lack understanding of how boundaries work to nurture and protect children because we were undisciplined ourselves as children.

When an immature adult attempts to apply boundaries to children, they end up just yelling a lot. Sometimes, as we know, this can turn into hitting and worse. For those of us who were raised by good parents it makes no sense. Again, as I have pointed out on other posts, we all have the illusion we know what others are thinking and feeling, when the truth of the matter is we haven’t a clue AND it is arrogance on our part to believe we do.

Poor parenting, free-range children, and the abundance of mind-altering distractions at every level, result in an overly medicated and addicted population where all are trying to bury their own private soul aches. And as unhappy broken souls seek to cover over their pain, they turn to medication, pornography, gambling, shopping sprees, cutting, meaningless endless tattooing, and the shallowest of relationships. It seems all addictions begin as attempts to bury pain of one sort or another.

Welcome to the bottom. Life at it’s worse. Where the running, fighting and faking all stop.

When do any of us stop our nonsense?

Perhaps when we have grown tired and finally see we are on an endless loop going nowhere.

Or we might arrive at the bottom due to the loss of a job, an accident, jail time, a separation, illness, or the death of a loved one.

What these all have in common, that indicates the bottom has finally arrived, is the mind stops its scheming. It is finally trapped and there is nowhere else to go except to sit in the quiet screams of regret.

Fortunately, at the bottom, at the still point, is where the dance begins.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; 
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, 
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, 
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, 
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, 
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.  T. S. Eliot