The other day it occurred to me that we are experiencing a giant collective case of the breakup blues. I’m not just talking about the banks and businesses that are breaking up. I’m talking about our relationship with the world as we knew it that got up and walked out the door sometime last September.
We can pine all we want for it. We can try to devise plans to woo it back but it’s moved on and wants nothing to do with the way we were. And we’re all in the throes of the breakup blues, not quite knowing what to do next. All of the familiar habits that come with long-term relationships are fractured or missing entirely.
We don’t quite know what to do without the cozy comfort of a consumer society. It was always there to make us feel better about who we were by offering us up the latest whatnot or whatzit. And we’ve yet to come to grips with the idea that we were in love with something that instead of truly loving us back was merely buying us off to distract us from the underlying issues in our relationship.
We’re like a teenager who falls for the cheerleader or the jock not because of who they are but because of an idea of what they’ll make us – more popular, more beautiful, more accepted. We are now learning those relationships can’t be sustained. And what we need to learn how to do is how to build a relationship with the world around us that brings out the best in both of us.
We need to stop waiting around for that call from a former lover that will never come and pick ourselves up and move on. We also need to be patient as we’re learning how to grow up.
