The Naked Jumper – Pt. 5

“Mirror, mirror on the wall…”

Are you sure that’s “Me”?

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In the half-darkness of twilight we all hide our crimes and misdemeanours carefully underneath a hard shell of well-worn words; words chanted hypnotically to convince and remind everyone  and ourselves of our “goodness”, “grace”, “kindness” and “caring”. This “virtue” chant conveniently conceals the deliberate and intentional mismanagement of ourselves and is traditionally accompanied by our eternal litany of excuses for this, that and the other. Counting virtues and flaws is the preoccupation of those who like to kick up a fuss over their misbegotten mediocrity and have nothing to talk of apart from their misgivings; either of themselves or others. Few, if any, can hold a candle to this “circus of self” paraded by the “better than, worse than” crusaders and we all, to a lesser or greater degree, come under this circus tent; we love to moan, rant, whinge, bitch and complain.

There is no real reason for it but it’s kinda understandable; it’s difficult to swim against the tide of what’s “expected” of you, whatever that is, be it positive or negative. No matter how much we might like to kid ourselves with our efforts of “fitting in” the irony is that nobody really “fits in”, everybody is a peculiarity unto themselves and everybody secretly knows it too. It’s a most public secret because if everyone did “fit in”, everything was the way it was supposed to be and everything always worked out there’d be a lot of smiling but instead, you see sad eyes trapped in miserable faces.  “Fitting in” has a cost, both to ourselves and others. It breeds an insidious and vicious cycle of hidden apathy; a culture of “settling” for things we “didn’t particularly want” that we “make do with” because we “can’t” see any other option or choice. Why? Because “that’s the way things are” and “that’s the way of the world”; we never question, nevermind challenge, such assumptions. It breeds a culture of fake contentment, deep insecurity and savage bitterness. We’ll go to extremes to “fit in”, we’ll willingly carve away huge parts of ourselves and others to achieve a “good” fit.

The non-smilers come in all shapes, sizes and colours, mostly garbed in the ego-centric trappings of conceit that belies a deep personal insecurity. The majority of non-smilers, will look up from their misery and then blurt “I’m just so unlucky” and the bitter non-smilers will just completely and utterly bathe in denial

The Naked Jumper – Pt. 4

“… And you thought you were a zebra all this time?”

Unthinking the imaginable

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People have an allergy to “change” regardless of what that “change” is. Many harbour romantic notions about themselves, that they are  still flexible, adaptable, broad-minded and open to change. However, by the time adulthood has taken a grip on our lives, most of us have become frozen statues of a person that we used to be, and we have eliminated any source that might disturb the stagnant pond we stand in. We have, through obstinacy and willfulness, allowed neglect to strangle one of our biggest assets; our imaginations.

We possess an extraordinary ability to constantly reinvent and transcend ourselves; to proactively initiate change and transform our inner worlds enabling us to envisage and shape our external world. Yet, astoundingly, most of us busily ignore this superb natural gift and smear ourselves with a slime of confusion about ourselves. Instead of realising that we are a constantly changing entity, and that “change” is one of our major distinguishing characteristics, we go “if I change I won’t know who I am anymore” and “that isn’t me”. It’s as if we are a talking chameleon that’s got stuck on one colour, that’s scratching its head and muttering “… colour changes, don’t be silly. If that happened you wouldn’t know you’re a lizard any more. You’d start eating grass and thinking you’re a zebra”.

Changes in our state of being, our person or personality, people find extremely disconcerting.  If you change you’re upsetting the delicate social eco balance of your relation to others and it’s inevitable

The Naked Jumper – Pt. 3

“Dream Killers”

The Jumper Nightmare: Having cake and eating it

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When we’re children we allow ourselves to be anything we want; we cannot see any reason why we can’t be what we want. However, a bit later we find out we were just practising and what “we want to be” is supposed to happen when we grow-up. So, we all look forward to being grown-ups. However, along the way to being grown-up we learn that it’s acceptable to not be what we want, in fact, it’s often encouraged and we learn about all the impossibilities of our dreams and aspirations; making them all useless, purposeless and fanciful. Until finally we grow up and embarrassed by our “childish thoughts”, we throw away our dreams.

Instead, we have children, houses, jobs, money, holidays and cars to replace our dreams. Dreams and aspirations are considered a temporary disease of youth and set aside for the young and innocent. It’s taken for granted such “foolishness” and “naivety” will get sucked out of us by life’s little setbacks, disappointments and potholes in the road. The best that most adults can do is dream and aspire for “better” children, houses, jobs, money, holidays and cars and that’s all we can envisage for ourselves; that’s all we can “realistically” dream of.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the biggest obstacle to us having “anything in the world that we might want” are the thoughts in our heads; what is “realistic” limits our tomorrows and makes a dissatisfying bed to lie in today. However, there’s a tendency to think the reverse; if we have dreams it’ll only make us dissatisfied and disappointed with our lot. When we see others achieve spectacular things, things that we don’t even allow ourselves to dream of, we secretly despise them; deep down we mutter to ourselves that those people are no better than we are and they aren’t that special really. Actually, they are. However, it’s  only a simple thing that makes them different;

The Naked Jumper – Pt. 2

“The War on Happiness”

The Tidal waves of Jumper disaster…

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Proactive undermining and fake praise is the “Jumper” currency and standard of communication. You can spot the “Jumper” by their negativity; they are beset by the rampant social disease of comparison. Everything they express is comparative, whether indirect, implied or explicit. Nothing said is simple or stand-alone and everything marks you on a scale of comparison; against someone, something or some social standard or value. Nothing has value unless set against something or someone else.

Lost is the idea of simple appreciation for the thing itself because we enjoy it. Appreciation and enjoyment is only possible through comparison and what is being enjoyed is the comparison, not the thing itself for itself. We even rename a “comparison” and call it a “reason”; a reason to like or dislike, adore or abhor because it’s “better than”, “worse than” or “same as”.  We’ve made it nigh on impossible to be happy with ourselves; there’s always some comparison or scale of measurement out there that we won’t score well on, and we’ll be sure to find it. We will constantly and automatically measure ourselves to find ourselves wanting. Bizarrely, it is the comparison we have learnt to enjoy and the thing itself is only important because it triggers a comparison. Our enjoyment of life becomes intricately entwined and nondetachable from scoring ourselves on various scales of measurement. Comparison has become the source of all “happiness”.

To compound matters we are trained from an early age to be cautious and to save up for a “rainy day”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being “sensible” until “sensible” becomes an extreme unto itself; we become blinkered about being “sensible”. The pre-empting and prediction of our rainy days becomes our obsession; our focus becomes skewed and our attention centred on what pains us. We think about all the bad things potentially coming our way; we plan for them and we expect them.