‘Losing touch with reality is often dangerous.
The following is a speech delivered by JEREMY SPRINGER, who has just published his bestseller, “Getting a Grip” to great acclaim. He was invited to lead a few sessions at the Springboard Self Help Support Group which currently consists of a variety of community members at different stages of life, all of whom have suffered from setbacks. Most have become disillusioned with their lives and are fraying at the edges.
Good evening, guys. Good to be back again and I’m glad you all seem to have made it, too.
I recognise a few from last week, but let me just refresh. Jim you’re here because you’ve been chasing the top job and you just found out last week that you’ve been bypassed for promotion. You knew you were the Next Big Thing, Mr Big Shot with the skills, the hand gestures, the disarming smile; you always reached your quotas first and thought that you were a certainty. But it turns out that you were the only one who thought like that in your company. So I bet you’re the one who eats his lunch at his desk, keeping your head down.
Jill, you’ve just about lost your house. You signed with one of those shysters who are telling us all that we can put a lousy five per cent deposit down on our dream home and after paying it off for five years, you’ve lost your job and your house. Miss Real Estate Supreme. Now you can’t get off your mother’s couch.
And Jack; the would-be famous guitarist who’s been strumming songs since you could lift the guitar. Your mother thought you were a protégé the way you could just sing a song and strum a tune; she thought you had the looks to go with it and put you on the pedestal; Mr Big Star; you practised on the decking; entertained your neighbours and your Dad got you the best teachers. So what happened?
To varying degrees we have all lost touch; we are all, like Holden Caulfield in another seminal bestseller Catcher in the Rye, in danger of falling off the cliff.
As Holden reminds us, it’s not our fault. It’s the goddam phony society in which we are living. It’s the materialistic rat-trap that’s warping our values and twisting our souls and feeding us a diet of confected lies. But does that make it any easier for us to deal with?
As my good friend Terrence Mckenna says, who I quote in my bestseller, “Get a degree, get a job, get a this get a that and now you’re a player.”
Well it looks like we’ve all played the game; but we’ve lost and lost rather badly.
And I count myself in. Once upon a time, I too saw my name in lights. I went to the best acting school at the New York Acting Academy, hobnobbed with the best actresses and actors in town, but I soon found out that they got all the parts, and I got none. I’m still trying to work out how that happened, but before I knew it, I was walking around like a shadow. Too scared to show my face anywhere because I was getting known as the jerk with the big head that started stammering every time I had to recite some lines.
So the first thing we have to do is to get off the materialistic treadmill because it’s eating away at us; like a deadly African virus its coursing through our veins, wrecking our self esteem.
By the way Did you enjoy The Longbard Theatre Company’s presentation of Death of a Salesman last week?
Uh uh … Yeah I thought you would. I choose it because I love Arthur Miller, i love Willy Loman, and because I went for that part. I wanted that part so badly when I was at The New York Acting Academy; I thought i gave the best performance of my life and they gave it to Dustin Hoffman!
Above all, I thought going as a group would be good for some group bonding; when you’re down, we all need a boost; but on another level, there are lessons for us here my dear friends.
Sure, most of us can see something of ourselves in Willy Loman chasing some elusive Dream that becomes like a millstone around our necks. His life, like ours, shaped by the size of or the absence of his pay check, always trying to “get ahead of the next fella” but never quite getting there. Always thinking that he’s the best loved salesman in town, but not getting the welcome he deserves. Now what a way to live!
Let me remind you of that time when Willy sits there recalling his memories of Dave Singleman who appears to be the best salesman in all America. Dave, we know, could simply pick up the phone at 84 years of age and command an audience. And soon after, he appears disjointed; dishevelled; alarmed; searching for the words to tell Charlie, “a man’s not just a piece of fruit”. And he stands there, Willy, look up into the darkness; you can feel his anguish; his pain; the fact that he has just been peeled like a goddam banana. And he knows it but he doesn’t want to know it at the same time and he simply can’t deal with it.
It reminds me of what Arthur Miller once said in his autobiography, Time Bends, this is the call of a terror-stricken man overwhelmed by the void.
I refer to a good old friend of mine in New York in my recent bestseller, who once said :
It’s probably why, Jack, you were drawn to Biff, a bit-player in a difficult stage in life trying to cope with enormous expectations which clearly do not fit. It’s the guitar all over again and I guess that’s why, I saw a quiet tear or two. And good on you, Jack.
Miller’s depiction of Biff shows a thoroughly decent bloke trying to throw off the yoke that’s choking him because he simply is not the one who can realise his father’s dreams. Through his attempts to resist, Biff shows us what we have to do. He also shows us that it is not easy. He struggles, with a dual sense of reality; one is the desire to placate his parents, but he knows that he will never be capable of this. He just wants to work with his shirt off; simply; honestly and courageously. But he is conditioned constantly to feel that spite is coursing through his veins and he cannot rid himself of an unbearable sense of guilt and failure, as if he has let down his father. But nevertheless he tries to keep his perspective.
So when you are fantasising about your wildest dreams; think about what you truly want. What is that drives you in this world? What is it that offers you solace even in the harshest of times?
Don’t be afraid to dream big and pursue the passions that fill the holes within your hearts. Break out of your mental constraints and begin to cherish the memories that you will experience on your own journey of self-discovery uninterrupted by the false pretences of the now. Live. . Or for some of us, we just have to get off, because we’ve got no choice. Bill you mentioned last week that you “don’t want to play in that game anymore”. What does that actually mean? I don’t want to play the game. Just think about it.
Dig deep. And you’ll find a casket of gold. Remember “unto thine own self be true”. Shrug it off; like Biff, think about the plants you are sewing; thing about the ducks you are feeding; think about the songs you are humming; think about the vegetables that you are growing and the food you are cooking in the kitchen. Be authentic.
Remember, I had to hit rock bottom before I managed to write my bestseller, which focuses on all those people who have tried and lost.
There are those who can pick themselves up.