Parents… and the holidays.

Parents are responsible for their children’s general perspective on life, until that child grows up and chooses to change it. I say this meaning a few things, which all relate to each other, kind of in a family tree format just upside down. The first of the few things would be the generation of the parents in relation to the generation of their child, this has its own personal effect on the childs perspective growing up. An obvious example of this is my own mother for example is 50 this year, and I am 20, leaving 30 years and two generations of time apart. The relationship and perspective of life I learned from my mother is much different say from one of my friends (the same age) whose mother is only 33. See the generation chart below to compare your own life.

Born	Ages
Gen Z	1997 – 2012	9 – 24
Millennials	1981 – 1996	25 – 40
Gen X	1965 – 1980	41 – 56
Boomers II	1955 – 1964	57 – 66
Boomers I	1946 – 1954	67 – 75
Post War	1928 – 1945	76 – 93
WW II	1922 – 1927	94 – 99

read more about the generations here

This gap between my mother and I has really diminished the magical feeling of the holiday season, as soon as I found out who Santa really was (age 7) I knew it was all an act. My mother never liked the holidays either, of course because she’s quite a bit older than me, her perspective on life is rather… old-fashioned and nihilistic lets just say. Since I was a child I’ve found new meanings for the holidays each year, and this year I’ve learned that you don’t need to celebrate with people. You can go on your own adventure, meet strangers, drop some acid and have way more fun than you’d ever expect. Life isn’t like the movies, it’s way better. Interchangeable and amorphous in so many ways no scientist can even explain why we are here. The closest they could get is to say well, we are just here. We are matter, we exist. Why? Well we aren’t really sure, but we still argue over why Earth is here too. Why is all this matter here is the big question not one answer can explain.

The holidays should be recognized for the experiences they create whether good or bad, they are teaching you something on a much bigger scale than any ordinary day would. The energy around the world shifts during holidays, as it would with any big day in the world, expected or unexpected. I’m sure you’ve heard or seen this quote somewhere,

“Change is coming. Whether you like it or not.”
Greta Thunberg. Watch the youtube video here.

At some point though, we all become responsible for our own lives. Our own choices and actions are our responsibility regardless of what some else does or has done. For me these past holidays reminded me why I’ve come so far in life, why I’ve always been so determined to feel something other than hopeless and depressed. Consider this next part an excerpt from a novel I am working on…

“I didn’t have any plans for Christmas Day so I decided to go for another long drive after driving to see my mother, with all this drama going around for the holidays I needed a break. Space from the craziness of civilization, and there I realized there are still people. People like me, trying to find the good experiences within the bad. I stopped driving to get a coffee in a small town a good 100 miles or so out from the city. The people I met that day had been going through their own holiday drama but nonetheless we all decided to make the best of it since we ran into each other. They paid my coffee and lunch, and the rest of the evening we met each other through the wonders of color and good energy. That whole evening was a great experience to remember, and unlike some intoxicated humans, I remembered a lot of that night, I wrote a lot too. The stories we shared and what I’ve already been through, it’s not odd for to me to call those strangers family. If I hadn’t drove through city after city, town after town and then had this sudden urge to get what must’ve been my 10th coffee that day, I don’t think I’d ever experienced that. And it’s what I needed to end this wild, wild year.”

If you’re going to take anything away from this post make it be this,

There is only so much life to live and so many places we could go. If we stay in the same place for too long we forget we are alive . We must move, we must be active and engage with living things to feel alive. What good are we alive, playing dead, only to wake and play victim again?
emriyus