ESSAYS on THE NEW ECONOMY #13

Feeling frustrated or angry is A-OK as long as we stay curious... all the way through to the end :)

In the New Economy, it will be more important your health than your wealth, more valuable the quality of your friendships than the quantity in your bank account, more inspiring to show how curious you are about others than to demonstrate how much you already know. Are you manifesting the New Economy in your life?

The Power of Admitting We’re Upset

There are times in our lives when we feel so lonely or frustrated or angry, maybe powerless, maybe because we feel life doesn’t make sense or that things are unfair.

Whatever the reason, we can become so upset, it’s like something surging within us and we don’t know what to do. We become like a conduit of some very powerful energy, and – as the Pixar film Turning Red shows – there are occasions when, whether as adolescents or adults, something very messy results. In Turning Red it’s a giant red panda tearing down a large stadium where a famous boy band had been performing, and in our real lives it might look like us punching a wall, shouting with fury, or bawling at the most inopportune moment. It’s as if we can’t help ourselves. We are so upset, we lose control.

We know that we could (or should) take a deep breath, let things go. We’ve tried that. The feelings are boiling up inside. It’s just too much.

Now I know, many of us have been trained to take the more polite, the more polished way, and we know from careful training we should remain calm, we should talk things out with patience, or behave in a way that’s non-disruptive to the environment around us. But sometimes – for better or worse – we just can’t!

Maybe you’ve felt that too: a strong insistence that as a society we ought to make space for these kinds of outbursts. Some stuff is just unfair! And policing things – as though the person with the strong feelings is the guilty party for feeling what they feel – is not a healthy approach. It teaches people to bottle up their true feelings, and we start to internalize guilt and shame.

We need more grace for the outbursts. We need more cinematic reminders (again, as the film Turning Red shows so well) that adults can have strong feelings too, and it can be destructive a little bit, but then we work together to clean things up. It’s okay to be imperfect.

Are you with me?

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[If that’s all you needed to hear, then thanks for reading me today.
If you’re curious to hear more, read on:]