Dear High School graduates

This is the time of year that we (the world) has thrust onto us the new year of “know-it-alls”, Yes it happens every year, and since your fellow students from last year have had all year to learn they know nothing, their number is diminishing.

Those of you thinking you have finished school and are ready to be unleashed annoyingly onto the rest of us, don’t yet know we are expecting your eyerolls… as well as your blanket statements, your soapboxes, and your ignorant comments that sometimes make us speechless.

Thing is, you are leaving high school with this false belief you know everything high school needed to teach you. I’m not even confident you are leaving high school knowing how to fully diagram sentences or calculate a circumference. And something you might need to hear is that every year the lack of common sense coming from high school students gets worse. So in a way it’s ironic you think you know so much. Those of us with decades of life experience since high school really struggle to take you seriously. If only you didn’t walk around saying things and making faces like you are so smart. If only you knew how ignorant you still are.

One of my theories you do this is because you don’t know what you don’t know. So we have to be a bit patient. You do know how to eat, shit, and wash yourselves, and you hopefully have a job which equates to some dosh in your wallet, but at this stage, there isn’t much else you have in hand.

Maybe the best advice you COULD heed, if you have the ability to accept you could use advice, would be to know out the gate that people who are older than you don’t have your views because they have more experience. Not because you are by some great fortune smarter than them. Believing you are smarter, makes you look stupid. Remind yourself of that as often as you can. LOTS of us with years of experience were just like you right out of high school… thinking we were ready. Well, you too will eventually learn your little ass is ignorant, just do yourself a favor and don’t go around shouting and showing your ignorance any more than necessary.

Especially about religion… gawd, I have to throw this in because there’s a reason you can now represent your church and try to get converts at 18 and 19 now… That’s the age you’re too stupid to know it’s not true. AND you think you’re right because the fact you’ve been brainwashed is something you are ignorant to as well… When you get older you will learn how easy that is also. (brainwashing people) Why else would so many of us older people no longer want anything to do with religion… we have educated ourselves out of it. See, again, young/old… you’ll get it one day.

So enjoy your youth… know you have a fuck-ton to learn, and do what you can to figure out what common sense is, instead of telling people how smart you are at your inexperienced age. We will all thank you for it.

Ok, Jump!

I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to skydive or paraglide. At some point in the terrifying sky-high process you will have to jump. Jumping is the hardest and scariest part of everything and far too many things in life can feel like being thousands of feet above the ground and being told it’s time to jump –then to just fucking FALL.

I think it’s that I’m too sensible for my own good –jumping (in order to fall) is not something I should do to remain healthy and IN ONE PIECE.

 

And yet…

People do jump often!

Daily.

And what do they get? 99% of the time exhilaration is what. How much exhilaration do I experience being a non-jumper? Ya, you guessed it… very little. Not that I’m saying I find myself needing that level of excitement in my life, I’m not. What I’m saying is there seems to be a lack of ability TO jump for me. Reward or not.

Some of my biggest realizations and lessons have come to me SINCE turning 40, and I’m constantly saying where would I be if only I had learned this at 25? Further ahead is where. But even as I say that, on my “cosmic scale of self-evolution”, I know full well that I was still a baby at 25. I don’t think I could have grasped a quarter of the things I’m realizing now.

Which makes me say: What are you going to do with this piece of information now girl? You going to benefit? And I hear myself replying –That looks like jumping. Even if it’s just moving forward with this new information about myself I’m still so damn unsure. (As I perceive it to be my hovering at the edge of the mountain cliff or at the open door of the plane.)

I feel like this is where I admit: Nobody gives a fuck of you jump Natalie. Only if you don’t’ survive would anyone care. And guess what little lady? You 100% will survive. It’s not actually a mountain top or a plane. It’s your courage, your ego, your self-perception, and your WILLINGNESS to be brave again after you jump. Which by the way is more like the height of the front step. “Mountains out of molehills” is what I’m doing, and if I insist I’m a tiny ant, then a mountain that molehill will be. But I’m not an ant, it’s not a mountain, I’m not skydiving or paragliding, there is NO actual falling.

The REALITY is that I’ve constructed a FALSE REALITY where fear is nicely hidden in the cracks and crevices so I’m able to pretend it’s not there, and in some areas it’s not. But in others it’s the glue holding the whole false perception together.

This is where I look at all this information and tell myself: Make a big deal of it if you want, it’s still only the size of the front step. So jump, or just walk.