THE LIFE STREAM – YOU FAILED!

Woah! I just woke up and it’s already 2017! April no less!

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was in class (year 1977) twiddling my pencil around a nicely carved drawing of Donald Duck under my desk lid, wondering why I had to be the same as everyone else in the room. Yes, even then I knew I didn’t fit in and that I was going to be my own man one day. That was 40 years ago!!! Gone in the futile blink of dozens of crap jobs, helping others achieve success, along with mixed, vague attempts at trying to set up my own thing over and over; all doomed in the past largely because of my own inept and somewhat abrasive approach at getting along by going along. start. stop. fail. start. stop. fail. start. stop. fail. Somewhere, along the way, I got trapped in “The Life Stream”.

THE RULES:

The rules to the Life Stream are simple, yet usually go without saying. You start by loving life, waking up each day to your adults smiling down at you offering bumbling “ah goo goo’s” (facial drunkenness and vocal gibberish) in an effort to make you smile so they feel like they created something unique and special. They’re not wrong.

Of course you smile cutely, generating huge magnetism so relatives and friends gather around and buy in to your undeniable, unique… cute. It’s true, back then you were unique, and for quite a while after.

Then you start School.

THE GREAT BUY IN:

School teaches you all the skills you need to get on in The Life Stream. Social Studies, Japanese, Art History, PE. School also teaches you that sheep aren’t actually blue (despite your creative prowess behind the colouring pencil in year 1; don’t worry they’ll soon beat that out of you).

Before you know it, The Life Stream gives you “Homework” and you begin to realise you can’t win. If you don’t do your social studies homework, you have FAILED at the life stream. You will be judged and compared from this point on by the standards and lines in the sand drawn only by those who know better. These people are the “experts” at getting along, by going along. So you do it, don’t you? You try your hardest to please these people who in fact are just as lost as you are, but they’re grown up, so they must know better right? They already swim in the stream!

Hang on. Something is getting watered down along the way to your successful transition into adulthood and participation in “The Life Stream”. Yea, you got a C+ in Art History and you passed your Elocution exam, but no longer are you… unique. Your Mojo is lost. You have morphed into an effective member of “The Life Stream”…the same as everyone else. Woop! You passed! Stoked for you man!

I too have become one of them, though begrudgingly; Awkwerdley. Misspellingly. My problem is that I have been swimming against The Life Stream current all this time. But why? Why didn’t I get brainwashed like so many of my school mates? Why do I have to go through life in circles? Why am I not an accomplished swimmer in The Life Stream?

Because I still believe sheep can be blue, that’s why.