I was on the phone to my dear friend Eileen the other day and at the end of our usual deep and wonderful, mischievous and iconoclastic conversation she said something in parting that rocked my world.
“Go and be fabulous.”
No one has ever said anything as astonishing to me in parting and nor has it occurred to me before to give a friend such a gift. I was so shocked that I needed to write it down so that I didn’t forget.
The kind of stuff I say at the end of conversations runs along the lines of, “lovely to talk to you,” “lots of love,” “Talk to you soon,” and so on. Sincerely meant, but actually pretty bland stuff.
In these incredibly dark days for humanity, something more is required.
The imposition of neoliberalism has met an unexpected buffer, the rise of social media and the democracy of the Internet. Something hitherto impossible has emerged, a means for ordinary people to not just talk back to and challenge power, but to communicate with each other as never before. After centuries of being talked at and patronised by those for whom power is their self assumed right, ordinary people have created a disturbance in the force and the tide of human progress and despite all their self serving arrogance, the so called elites don’t know how to cope with it.
It is not, however, just the arrogant elites who are struggling to deal with it, many traditionalist ordinary people are struggling too. Change is challenging and many find it too challenging or, through never reaching beyond the mainstream narrative, are unaware that a revolution is going on.
At a very personal level, I have struggled to meet the challenges of our time. True, I’ve been speaking out, but internally a battle has been going on. It is a welcome battle but it is also a frustrating one.
The essence of it is that before I consider the challenges and changes to anything else, I have to change my own mind… and that is an epic challenge. In order to meet that challenge, in January 2016 I sought out counselling and set out to interview counsellors to find the right one for me. As it happens, I struck gold in my first interview with a wonderfully experienced, gifted, insightful, intuitive and empathic counsellor with whom it is an absolute privilege to work.
Crucially for me, I wanted a female counsellor, a yin to my yang. That may be of no significance to others, but for me it’s a biggy. I am sure it can’t have escaped too many people’s notice that women and men are different from the inside out. I don’t buy the separatists Venus and Mars thing, but I definitely buy the complimentary Yin and Yang thing. As a heterosexual male, from puberty onwards I have had a deep and abiding love of women in general, even if the occasional profound dislike specifically, Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May being two of them.
I am not sure if a man could have come up with saying “Go and be fabulous” as surely as Eileen did. I can see that I might have done one day, but it would have taken me longer and, even then, would likely only have come about because of the influence of women in my life. There are many variations which I will use as I adjust to the newness of it. Be delicious. Be wonderful. Be juicy. Be outrageous. Be sublime. Be tasty. Go and be fucking yummy! There are many more that will spring to mind if we venture to be fruitful.
There is much we can do with and for each other, not least to ignite the life in us in this marvellous gift we have been given courtesy of Mother Nature.
Our time here is short and does anyone really not want to live fruitfully? Yes, even those dismal bastards at the top who are hell bent on making our lives miserable.
I have said it before, we are better than this. I care not who you are or how bad your life is right now, we are wonderful creatures.
We are, against all the odds in an infinite and largely unpopulated universe, alive by the fortunate happenstance of birth on this tiny planet. Is that not and are we not amazing?
So, to all my very dear fellow travellers in life, be absolutely gorgeous.
With delicious love,
KOG.
