Life As Performance Art 26

Life isn't a joke. But life is so funny. We are here for a short time. Very true. Too true. We are all going to die. I am going to die. And so are you, Gentle Reader. When I turned fifty, I really began to consider my shelf life, my mortality. I was already accepting that I would not be around for as long as I had already lived, that I was already past the halfway point. I had already logged several years experience of palliative care, professional, voluntary, and with my mother. When you are still in your twenties and you are suddenly caring for the dying, this can be quite a useful if brutal lesson in life. It matures you, fast. It can also traumatize you. Usually it does both, and this happened to me. But I don't really think that it is possible to fully live life and also escape trauma. When people see their life's work and investments swept away by flood or incinerated by fire, they invariably get traumatized. Or, wait a minute. I have elsewhere on these pages written about trauma as being normative to our human condition, and that the idea that this is an ill that we can somehow escape or cure is very typical of the specious and escapist nonsense of the privileged classes who live in privileged countries where it is commonly accepted that we are above such misery. Until it happens to us. We have too many protective barriers and filtres that still keep most of us from fully experiencing life, and this has turned middle class white Canadians into a particularly loathsome brood of soft, protected and weak little sissies. Most of us just are not ready when life happens and throws the very best of its worst at us. Trauma alters you for life. It is not necessarily a bad thing. It can actually provide some of us with just the kind of ass-kicking that will rescue us from our pampered and odious selfishness. In order to become vectors for the change that the growing challenges of our world and planet are requiring, we have to risk being transformed and that is not going to be easy. It is going to be scary, painful and, yes, traumatizing. We cannot escape from it. Trauma is a surgical instrument of change, transformation and healing. I know this, as a veteran of trauma and PTSD. Having a concept of God in our lives is helpful, and necessary, for this change to be something healing and powerful. Unfortunately, there are very few people who understand God as the most primal and fundamental experience of our humanity, for whom this beautiful and most essential reality has been debased into various sets of beliefs and religious rules and norms. God is infinitely more than any of that. But to give way to God in our lives, we have to accept that we are not the controllers of the universe, and this entails humility, and humility is usually brought on by trauma, and most of us remain, oh, so afraid of letting God have his way with us. No matter how much we ruin our own lives in the meantime. Pathetic.