When idle, bored and without my cell-phone I often find myself wondering why so many adults are so disconsolately messed up. Why do citizens of the prosperous West dwell so habitually in dissatisfaction and angst.
I recently learned that my good friend, Currado Malaspina, a friend who shares with me a near permanent state of perplexity and disappointment, attended a seminar at the Paris Center for Intentional Living (Centre de Paris pour l'existence intentionelle) in order to see for himself what it is that is eating all these fortunate people.
Aside from the typical poverty of juvenescent hugs, it seems that regular honest and well meaning folks are simply bored with their prosperity. There seems to be a universal craving for programmed disobedience. Living by the conventional rubrics of work, love and leisure, by the time a person reaches the age of about 45 they begin to realize that they are singularly unexceptional.
What makes things worse, these same sad civilians lack the imagination to find the easily accessible consolations of great art and literature.
At the Center for Intentional Living dentists, career office workers and accounts managers are regularly told how génial! they are. Currado tells me that they often actually use the word 'awesome' in English as if this all purpose platitude finds greater potency than all the available French equivalents.
This stubborn hunger for salvation is a cash cow and although the French government has effectively banned more than a few so-called 'personal actualization' outfits in the past, they keep springing up like truffles after a summer rain.
The typically skeptical Malaspina was so moved by what he saw that he has completely changed the nature and purpose of his work.
His new theme comes with a simple, urgent message:
Love your kids and do everything you can to make them confident, independent and above all, mutinous and willfully defiant!
