Wednesday, November 4, 2009

I Want To Spend The Rest Of My Life Alive


So I've been pretty obsessed with this song lately.  Jon Foreman (lead of Switchfoot) descibes the rapid flourishing of the pharmaceutical companies as indicative of their claim, and our belief, that drugs bring abundant and true life, -on the market drugs and off the market drugs.  I agree with him.  This era, among other things, is the chemical era. The chemicals intially appear to help but eventually they enslave and cripple.  I don't know when we started to believe that life shouldn't be painful or hard or depressing -at times, but whenever that was, we figured out chemicals could soften it, or mask it, or whatever.  Once we've softened or masked it we don't need to work as hard at figuring out the reason for the pain or struggle.  We can get rid of the problem by numbing ourselves to it.  Alcohol used to be the old numbing agent, but that has become easy for people to identify as a problem.  The chemicals our good doctors prescribe and the world around us endorses are much easier to justify.  I am one that happens to believe that life, at times, will contain pain and emotional valleys that will quite frankly be crippling.  And that's OK.  I know sometimes it's horrible and suffocating.  But that's how life is... sometimes.  Society seems to think we should find a chemical to make it all better so we can get up and go to work, or school, or whatever else is expected of us and be fine.  There's a couple problems with this.  First, this isn't life.  Life is good and bad, fun and hard, that's just the way it is, sometimes I believe we're supposed to be terribly horribly miserable.  And second, it doesn't work anyways.  The chemicals usually just mask and numb and put off dealing with the problem.  The problem is still there and now you have potential chemical dependence on top of it.  If you are struggling with a dependency on a chemical, on the market or off, for an "unidentifiable cause," I encourage you to work very very hard at stepping away from it. Yes you may be sad, or in pain, or miserable, but you'll be alive and one day you will rise out of that and be happy -and it will be a better happy than the chemical happy.  I want to spend the rest of my life alive.

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