As Comic Relief approaches I find myself thinking about some comic relief of my own.
How I love Morecombe and Wise. Their humour and the silliness and also the fantastic affection and warmness for each other, shining through their performances….. And, in the midst of all the current, well, whatever it is we have at this time, in this world, how I wish for more Morecombe and Wise types to raise our spirits and keep us seeing the silliness in things.
At their peak, around 30 million watched their Saturday Night shows. Half of our country enjoying, at the exact same time, the laughter and giggles that their show brought, every single week.
And what do we have now. Hmmmmm? EastEnders? Not quite the same really is it? And then we have the enlightening news and media coverage, my goodness, it’s a wonder any of us can manage to get ourselves out of bed in the morning! Ok, it’s not all bad, if we search hard enough we still find some gems.. got to search though!.
Yet this is what we seem to accept today, in our every day lives. We see the hurts that the media ‘report’ on a daily basis, with their ‘out of context’ edits, etc., in the name of, perhaps, entertainment versus real news. So, this mainstreaming becomes part of our culture and we too may even, unknowingly, reflect these behaviours.
And, so the chipping away at our souls begins and we accept it in the name of free speech / another persons’ opinion and, sadly, entertainment (the modern day ‘stocks’ perhaps?). The emotional manipulation rolls out into the general public into our way of life (ever been in a school yard and been part of gossip / tittle tattle, for example?!)
What happened to respect for other people and their feelings? We still ‘take the michael’ out of other people but it’s often different now…. it used to come from a position of love/warmth, where it can be accepted, isn’t that called friendly banter?
Now it, more often than not, it may come from a position of dislike, envy, competitiveness or something else on the negative spectrum and, of course, the end result is that people can be hurt / angry / revengeful / hateful etc… And even when things may be meant in gentle fun it may still be taken the wrong way, as we assume incorrectly, due to past experiences, or ‘the culture norm’.
So we ‘think’ and keep rational in all of this and try to switch off from the ‘emotion’ of it all saying that ‘we’re better than all of that’ Right?
Well, we are aren’t we? Well, no, not really!
We forget that as humans, we are huge emotional creatures. As soon as we attach an emotion we really are capable of anything, have you ever noticed that?
To ‘emote’ is what motivates us. The world is our oyster if we feel it to be true. If you doubt it, just look at the fantastic true stories from our entrepreneurs of how they became successful… Seeing what they want to achieve, feeling it (feel it in their bones) and wanting it enough to motivate and move them toward it and, the more positives they get along the way the more the momentum builds to resolve.. emotion, emotion, emotion!
The toxic ‘chipping away’ just serves to chip away at our most fantastic emotions, crippling us into more frustration, sadness, anger, hate, stress. Going back to Eric and Ernie, their first ever media critique almost crippled them - we may never really have ever really known the genius of Eric & Ernie - if it hadn’t been for their own resolve and surrounding support and belief in them.
We are all faced with challenges, ups and downs and that’s the balance of life. Our natural balance of positives over negatives, as a magnet has a positive and a negative and as the Earth has opposite poles of north and south… Life’s balances.
Once we truly understand the importance and huge strength of our emotions we may re-learn to encourage and nurture the best ones and maintain our balance… Or we wait until we totally ‘bottom out’ before we finally find the emotional strength to say ‘enough is enough’ and then finally begin to search more for the lovely things in life.
Here’s to the fantastic Morecombe and Wise; bring us sunshine!
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