Changing The Flow of Our Lives
by Greg Moody
Veruca Salt is now a role model, it seems, of how one should act during the holidays, or, at the very least, act while you’re in Vegas over the holidays.
With the Newley/Bricusse tune, “I WANT IT NOW!” blasting over the tinny speakers of the flat screen, The Venetian Hotel promotes a journey of conspicuous consumption if you drop by for a long weekend of booze, buffets, bets and busted flushes.
*
James bought James a new Buick, because James deserved a new Buick. Good for James. Two ladies bought themselves Buicks as well, one, because she “wanz it.”
*
A guy not only buys his presumed wife a new SUV, he buys himself a new vehicle as well, a pickup truck of some sort, her SUV in red, his truck in gunmetal gray. She immediately goes for his, squealing, “I love it, I love it.” The disappointment lingers in his voice as his $50,000 gift to himself is transferred to the love of his life and he’s stuck with the smaller, red Mom-mobile.
Ya shoulda asked first, Bub.
Ya shoulda listened.
And, yet, life is short, and love can fade, especially when one is aching with loss over the truck one has already named and was proudly planning to take on next week’s fishing trip to Tahoe with the boys.
“Look what I bought, you lowly sunzabitches!”
A red SUV doesn’t cut it in that company.
I wonder who will get which truck in the settlement?
And who will get the kids.
*
A woman on the verge of anorexia gets a new Peloton to celebrate, God, I don’t know what, Saturnalia? The Birth of Christ? The Holiday Shopping Season? A sale at Penney’s! Her brand new $3000 exercise bike will inspire her to get even more fit following the holidays, while also providing a convenient drape for wet towels come March.
*
And Zach Levi, a wonderful actor, leads a crowd of excited Holiday shoppers, rather like the Pied Piper, to the front doors of three merchants, promising lower prices and plenty of selection of gifts you don’t have to ponder or think about for people you don’t want to ponder and or think about for the rest of the year.
“Hey, I got you a something!”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have! No, I really mean it — you shouldn’t have.”
It’s hardly a new thought: We live in an age, and a country, of often mindless, rather conspicuous consumption.
We’re not struggling to survive, for the most part, as a majority of American are not searching for the next meal to put on the table, a warm place to sleep, but are, instead, searching for a new way to prove their love, their friendship, their compassion and their very sense of self.
They do it through giving and are so encouraged.
It may be a toaster they’re giving, or two pewter candlestick holders or a book that no one wants to read that will soon be holding up a wobbly corner of the refrigerator, but it’s the thought that counts.
Even when no thought has gone into it.
That looks green. You like green.
Perhaps, it is time to change the paradigm, to alter our perception of the holidays, to adjust our perceptions of giving and sharing and living with one another.
Open Your Heart
“Open your heart.”
Can something so simple truly become transformative? Truly change the way you live and give?
I have no idea, at least, not yet, but it’s certainly something I intend to strive toward in the years that remain.
Without it, closed off as we often are to the world around us, we bumble through our lives, an odd mix of anxieties, of our personal presentation before friends and society, and fears over money and politics and the anger that seems so prevalent in our time.
“If necessary, I’ll buy your love, your vote, your respect, with shiny things and money and tax breaks, and, perhaps even merely agreeing with you, even though I find your position stupid and inhumane.”
Fed so often by a media filled with bombast, rage and possession, searching for more viewers and money while disdaining the ideal, the core values, the people that we strive to become, we are reduced to simple eyeballs, our minds vacuuming up today’s tidbits and commentary and waiting for the chance to take a break through four minutes of new product pitches, that allow us to breathe and dream and want anew, without the necessity to ponder, dissect or truly absorb any of what has come before.
So —
Open your heart.
Take a moment to see beyond the ads and the anger and “the yelling guys” to discover the real world behind the gauze curtain we so often pull across our own eyes.
Take a moment to see the lost souls, both at the border and down the street, huddled under Mylar sheets to ward off the cold, while hoping, praying for a better life.
Yes, certainly, many are there as the result of their own choices: drugs, alcohol, pain, struggle, the human desire to flee terror and death, at the risk of one’s own life, in order to find something better for themselves or their children. Mental health. Bad luck. The world is filled with bad luck. But, still, doesn’t each person deserve an open door, a hand up, a hot meal, a willing ear?
See them. Hear them. Open your heart.
See the family that not only sits next to your hearth but is framed in the pictures that surround your life. See them, hear them, be open to their pain and joy and frustration, their victories and defeats, their search, no matter how long or clumsy, for their own place in the world.
See the friends, or strangers, who are trying, so desperately, to reach out, to find an ear, to share their lives, both good and bad, while hoping to find someone who can hold a hand on their back and say, quietly, “don’t worry, I’ve got you.”
Be that hand.
Be that ear.
Be that person in a life who cares, and listens and feels, lifting a burden if only for a moment.
You don’t have to carry it for them. Only they can do that.
You merely need to listen and lighten the burden by hearing their story.
Open your heart.
We all need that moment, when someone truly hears us.
You won’t find that in TV.
Or in a new truck.
Or the bottom of a bottle.
Or in any of the myriad places we search, constantly, minute by minute, day by day.
We find that in the people around us, who, even if for just a moment, care enough to hear, to see, to reach out a hand.
We find that in our capacity to care, to love, to live mindfully, to share with thoughtfulness.
Open your heart.
Make it your mantra.
And while I may still slip and falter and grasp at shiny objects, wrap myself in cynicism and sarcasm, I look to find a new purpose in how I live and how I treat the world around me.
Simply, by opening my heart.
Opening my heart to you.
~fin
