We might find more reason for pause and transformation if we scratched our own itches. The only thing I know from the raggedness of experience acquired in this trip around the hamster wheel of life is that we ALL share in struggle. Some of the most successful people – and certainly some of the most interesting people – are those who overcome struggle. Others get consumed by it. The only difference between us still here and those who are gone is a matter of degree. Look in the mirror. Study your mind. Dig at the nooks of your own vulnerabilities.

In the dark, staring at stucco stars and restless in the night, I can see into the chasm of darkness. Frantic about work deadlines, I can feel the weight of the smothering pillow in my heart palpitations that wake me in a cold sweat. In all my hopes bundled into the angst of my teenagers expressed in tears and short tempers, I can feel the fear of falling. For my weaknesses and all that I am not, I can see myself drowning while struggling to shore. For my mid-life questioning of whether I need divine epiphany to explain my place and purpose in this world, I can understand the wayward soul. For that extra glass of wine, I can feel myself medicating to cocoon from the troubling 24/7 news cycle.

I think struggle is amplified by today’s drive for perfection and productivity. Society – in its pursuit of a success at all costs regimen – magnifies instability for those who wonder why they couldn’t have been the special one, the talented one, or the more determined one. We ask for perfection in airbrushed magazine cover and endless “10 ways to have better _________” stories. We compare our lacking lives to the glossy happiness of our friends’ Facebook posts. Kids are playing high tier sport at 8 before they have even sprung a leak from LEGO …parents popping arteries on the sidelines or in the stands believing their kid is “the next one.”

Our chilling world has us not knowing our neighbours, unengaged with our physical community, and watching too much “you’re fired” on TV where humans – with real emotions and feelings – are glibly mocked, jeered, and degraded as if they are soulless icicles.

Life’s “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” has added the discomfort of accelerating change. We toss the bowling balls – conflict of time and energy, of work and family, of competition to be better, faster and stronger, of life in imbalance – into the salad spinner of the mind and wonder why our spirit feels like a tempest in a teapot.

We are made more prone to crack under pressure in the teapot because we don’t want to show weakness at risk of our friends or employers thinking less of us. We are to “suck it up,” “grow a pair,” or “make it happen” we are told from young age. We hide or manage – with substances as our crutch, or bravado of confident shield we etch around our vulnerability and our fear. For all the warmth of our family or our friendships, we can feel cold in the lack of meaningful connection to our real beating heart. We fake our happiness to get by, communicating in the superficial. We fear anyone getting through our manufactured invincibility.

Paradoxically, something that I have learned over the years is that those who are most prominent in media or who we have placed on pedestals are often those who have built the strongest defense mechanisms around the insecurities of their lives. Perhaps our “heroes” are mis-placed, in days in the life where folks like teachers, coaches, emergency service workers, and community-builders quietly knit the fabric of the exceptional.
I resent that our chilling world extends to lack of caring for “us” in organizational dynamic in our demonstration of pyramid of power and cult of personality. I lament that we let people suffer in their own dark places. I am sent to the slides in life’s game of Snakes and Ladders in the nagging of feeling that our humanity is losing toehold on what it means to be human.

We aren’t weak for our weaknesses. We are strength in the struggle to overcome. And society is only as strong as its capacity to care about and for the most vulnerable among us.

I think we only tack in a different direction from our scourges when we acknowledge it’s OK to struggle. It’s OK to ask for help. It’s empowering to accept that you don’t know everything, and that you seek help and input from others. It’s OK to have bad days….wouldn’t be great there was a Crappy Days Facebook so we could have some fun with peeling the veneer off false sunshine and rainbows. It’s OK to accept the perfect imperfect in work and life. How energizing it could be to embrace the perfect imperfect as manifesto, in context of our appreciation of our life as a temporary gathering of atoms that aches to be freer and lighter.

It’s our vulnerability that makes us likeable, and powerful as people and humanity in the broadest definition of the word. The sum can be greater than the parts, but moving beyond the cliché of the term means giving equal attention to all of our parts in both its high mountain peaks, and its frailties.

We are all family; the boundaries of country, race, religion, and a million other categorizations are manifested by the fearful to divide us. To lose one of us is tragedy. If only we could love others just a little more and tune our attention to those in need of our help. How much we could progress if we could collectively learn the lessons offered by our growing number of broken spirits.