Everybody Gets Clobbered

Everybody Gets Clobbered

No one here gets alive is a line taken form the Doors’ song “5 to 1” & then used as the title of the biography of Jim Morrison. Clearly Jim Morrison, who wrote the lyrics, had a rather fatalistic view of life… and yet because he knew deep in his bones that these lyrics spoke the truth he lived this life richly, with zest, full of vitality and never by half measures. In other words, in some ways this seemingly fatalistic view of life enriched his life and made him more alive during his short life. Sure he got clobbered – we all do – but he also REALLY lived.

Now I’m not quite as fatalistic as Jim Morrison and I don’t recommend his lifestyle – although I do recommend some of his music – but I appreciate one possible insight this line can provide us: facing our mortality in a healthy way adds to life and does not subtract from it as many assume. When we face all of life with all its beauty and all of its ugliness as well we really live instead of being semi-conscious zombies [ie. consumers] who simply exist. A rock exists but you, as a conscious being, can do more than merely existing. When you really engage with life, and that includes not being fearful of getting clobbered [because you’re going to get clobbered anyway] then every moment can be savoured; just like you savour a bottle of vintage wine. Every moment is potentially amazing, every moment can fill you with awe and inspire you do be and do more than you could possibly imagine.

In other words, one of the “secrets” to life is to prepare yourself to get clobbered so you don’t feel sorry for yourself and so you can still believe in yourself after whatever unfair, unjust or just plain nasty event happens to you. In other words, although we should try to make life safe and fair and just it will never be completely safe or fair or just so we must also develop some guts and fortitude and capabilities that will get us through the tough spots in life. Here is a concrete example of what I mean. I heard this from a High School teacher friend of mine last night. He had recently attended a speaking event about how to help kids be more resilient and the speaker contrasted the parenting styles of the past where his parents in particular did not see their kids as victims. [note; today the culture promotes a victim-hood mentality and generally finds blame elsewhere rather than finding out how I can respond and what I can control] The speaker looked at how we respond to bullying today vs. when he was a kid in the early 1980s. Today most parents, if their child is bullied, complain to the teacher and Principal about it and demand “action”. This is understandable and yet……when the speaker was bullied as a kid and told his parents about it they simply signed him up for karate class. He became the youngest person to earn a black belt in Karate in the USA. His self confidence soared. This decision transformed a “I got clobbered event” [eg. poor me] into a “I am developed more self-confidence” event. [eg. I am amazing and can help others be amazing too]

The difference in the 1980s parenting style of this parents is that learning Karate built up the inner confidence of the child and enabled him to see that he was never only a victim: that when life gets tough “the tough get going” and that sometimes, in some weird way the “nasties” of life can be exactly what you needed to build you up and wake you up and make you more than you possibly could have been if life was only easy. In other words this quote from Vince Lombardi, the famous football coach, does not only apply to football, but all of life. More than that, getting tackled in not only inevitable but can [sometimes] be the secret sauce that was needed to become a better you.

It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up

Sometimes I think that our current self made ecological disasters are actually needed to wake us up. Perhaps they are a necessary step in developing an ecological and social consciousness that pulls us out of our current self absorbed, short term thinking way of being that is quite frankly too stupid to notice that when we chop the whole forest down, as the Once-ler did in the Dr. Seuss’s book The Lorax, we have not just destroyed the forest we have destroyed ourselves. So does that make me a fatalists like Jim Morrison? I don’t think so, because I am convinced that we will become as wise as the Lorax and leave our primitive “Once-ler” worldview behind in the dustbin of history. However, as a realist, I also think that process will be very, very painful because quite honestly, based upon my life experiences, I only truly change in a positive way once I get clobbered.