Clever Conversations

CREATING CLEVER CONVERSATIONS THAT MATTER -

Nicqui Yazdi - 2010 Byron Shire Citizen of the Year

This is the first article in a series about life, parenting, young people and their issues, mental health and well-being and things in general that effect our community and its' people. I will be writing about the things that I see that motivate me and the things that move me enough to want to be actively involved in volunteering in our community. I'm hoping that this series will instil in others a desire to become more emotionally engaged and to honour the kind of integrity that keeps life in our community real and inspires true service within it. I'm passionate about people, what makes them tick and what makes them stick. I am hoping that these articles will bring out the same passion in those that read them...

I have made it my career and my duty to know and understand about the things that effect us and shape our lives, especially those things that scar us when we are young. Mental health problems make up the biggest burden on our society today and these problems start early. By the age of 13 half of all the anxiety disorders that are ever going to exist are already there and presenting themselves. The largest problems associated with the abuse of alcohol exists in the under 18 age group. They aren't even legally allowed to drink yet! Their brains aren't properly formed or even remotely finished growing yet either. The younger you start drinking alcohol, the higher the chance of developing serious mental health issues as an adult, especially if you are under 13 when you start. I could go on but will save that for another week.

There are a lot of lurking dangers out there... and we all should be watching closely over where life is going and our connection to creating the future. Our future lies in our own hands and we also hold the hands and the futures of our young. Responsibility for our young people doesn't just lie with their parents and elders, it belongs to the whole community. Our environment forms who we become, all of us. Our future is made from present and past influences upon our lives. We all have a responsibility to be involved to raise our community's young people to be educated, safe, secure, well-balanced and successful.

Part of that responsibility lies in adults knowing that there are boundaries, guidelines and consequences that need to be learned, in order to walk safely through life... and teach this to our young, as we live in a very precarious balance.

We need to show our kids by example, even if they don't get it at the time. Eventually we all do, especially when we become parents ourselves. There is an inbuilt radar that beeps really hard at our conscience when we do things, or don't, that are going to effect our children and their future. It is inherent in all of us to protect the young of our species, but our own ancestry, as well as our life's experiences, predestines our reactions to everything and everyone around us and we sometimes get it wrong. It is a long road that leads us to adulthood and parenthood and we sometimes have troubles along the way that don't make the ride easy, or get us to the desired destination, or make us the best of parents. No one is perfect, but there is an ideal and it is almost universally sought after. We want the future to be better for our kids and their kids.

Most adults these days are also constantly trying to make themselves better in some way too. Investing a lot of time, effort, energy and money into becoming a more fulfilled human. Many realise that their young years left them with holes in their souls and so many of these adults spend their middle age years try to fix these problems. But their own children are doing the same as they did and creating black spots in their own beings. But so often parents put this down to the rites of the passage of those teenage years. They will survive, just as we did. But we didn't, did we! We are all damaged in some way. We have seen things that have hurt us. And continue to hurt us. We have been so used to carrying all this stuff that has been piling up since childhood, that we think it's normal to suffer. We accept it as part of the human condition. But we can be helped.

As we are growing up, we start to take in our environment, all of it and throughout our lives this never ends. But when we are young, we don't have a wealth of experiences to help guide us. We are always living in the now, clutching at whatever comes to us when we need to adapt quickly to situations. We make it up in the moment and not always in ways that keep us safe. When we are young, life really is right now and our actions are impulsive and instinctive and not often the best thing to do. But they are all we know. We also think we are invincible and that nothing will go wrong for us. Those things that happen to others won't happen to us. We are special. We kid ourselves, because we are still kids and we haven't seen enough of the real world to be afraid of it yet. But our elders try to tell us. They say they know how it is going to be for us. But they are not us and we don't believe them anyway. So we let ourselves go to places that will hurt us, not because we meant to, but because we couldn't really know any better yet.

The equilibrium that we all strive for in our existence isn't always easy to attain. For some it becomes seemingly impossible to do alone. We may be conceived with a potentially perfect future, but from the very first moment there are an infinite number of things that can go wrong. Nature doesn't really have balance, it has dangerous twists and turns just waiting to take us off the road and throw our journey off course. But those things that challenge our right to a normal existence, also bring our greatest achievements, when we learn to be aware of the dangers and overcome them in order to stay on that path. There are some people though that find the twists and turns take them more than others and they end up further and further away from where they were heading and they are often our very young.

Perfect harmony and balance are not possible things. They go against the very nature of everything that we know. Everything is mutable and in a constant state of chaos, organised though at times it may seem. Perfect harmony and balance would be a vacuum where nothing changes, nothing moves forward or backward or anywhere. Learning to live in a constant state of flux, takes dedication and requires as little resistance as possible. On a cosmic level we are literally being tossed around in a universe that doesn't know that we think we are special. It doesn't care either. It is just always going to continue hurtling us through something so big that we can't fathom what it's all about. And it makes us ache to know why and what for...

On an earthly level it is exactly the same. We are at the mercy of the random nature of our planet and it's tumultuous but tentative existence. On a human level, we are completely vulnerable to anything that wishes to do damage to us, whether it be natural disasters that change our planet, destroy our homes and devastate our souls, damage from other humans, or animal, or bacterial, or man-made dangers. We are fragile.

We do however, live in very auspicious times. Everyone and all human knowledge is only a moment away. We are open and connected to the entire world and what we know of the history of everything and that knowledge is rapidly growing every moment. Constantly, information is exploding across every part of the earth and because of this, we are watching the evolution of humans occur at a phenomenal rate.

The last few decades' advances in technology now have us believing that absolutely everything that we can imagine, is possible and many more things that we can't possibly imagine are also potential. We communicate in ways that weren't even predicted when we were young. We now need to learn how to manage all this technology and communication. It is a whole new world that a lot of adults are fast getting lost in. Bamboozled and bewildered by the stuff that our kids seem to instinctively know how to operate, the gadgets and gizmos that make up this new digitally capable human life. This is a brand new chapter of human history in the making, where the world almost fits in the palm of your hand and kidz rul! We adults need to help each other to adapt to these changes too!

It's as hard to be an adult in such a youth focussed and oriented world as it is to be a young person growing up in it. Many parents seem to be swamped under the stresses of trying to keep up with such a fast changing pace. The things that we need to pass onto our young and knowing what they really are, is the hardest task we have. In fact, the tables seem to have turned and it is now the young teaching the old how to survive in a paperless world, where we no longer write anything down and it is all being stored in places that live somewhere in the invisible ether of the mysterious world wide web. Not in a drawer or on a bookshelf where it used to be safe to keep the special stories and secrets, where we knew they were there and we could access them, hold them in our hands and pass them on in hard copy to our kids. Those days seem gone forever.

Those of you that are in your third generation will say that it's always been like this, that life is constantly changing, technology evolving and our young are always smarter with each new age that comes into being. But it's never been quite like this!

So how do we adults find the stuff that we need to navigate through all this new technology and knowledge? How do we keep up with all that is happening? How do we safeguard our young? We network. We do what our kids are doing, we communicate. There are no taboos anymore, no deep dark family secrets that need to stay hidden for the sake of misguided honour. The year is 2010, if shit happens, all we need to do is ask for help and someone will help us clean up the mess. We know there is a network for every possible need. Friends, family, professional help and education are the keys to successful communication and a better future. And sharing our stories and our knowledge keeps us in a healthy relationship with the ever-changing requirements of being an adult in this life.

Education really begins after you leave school and start to forget all the irrelevant stuff that the elders and history thought that you might need to know, but probably didn't. It is always just what is shown down the generations. The proper ways to do things, according to those that have been here before us. But each generation and its' needs are always different. We need to keep learning about the new ways to do things and accept that the responsibility to continue to learn and educate ourselves, is a life-long requirement. We need to make sure that we don't lose sight of the future as it manifests, for it is the future and it is the responsibility of everyone to be present in it and not stuck in some darkened past.

As a mother of two daughters of my own and a whole community of young people that I feel personally connected to and caring of, I can't help but want to get involved and see what I can do that might make a difference to their future. Over the last few years, I have worked toward making things happen, that will have a positive outcome for us all. I have connected with many others in the community who are also working towards the same goals, to make life better. I have been inspired by the enormity of community volunteering that happens here in the Byron region and been blessed with so many opportunities to join forces with so many of these people on projects that work to better serve the interests of all of our people and especially our young people and those that suffer from mental health problems.

Two weeks ago I was awarded Byron Shire Citizen of the Year for my work within the community. Although I am very grateful for such an honour, nothing that I have done, was done alone. I am connected to a very strong network of tireless workers, both paid and unpaid, who have supported and assisted all the way. I was in fact very surprised to receive such an honour, especially as it was for doing the things that I have loved doing so much.

The last few weeks a lot of people have been asking me why I do what I do and especially about the volunteer work. The answer isn't always that clear, there are a number of reasons I guess. Firstly, because there seems to be a lot of people needing help these days and not all of that help is catered to by a wage-paid employment contract. There are many things that just need doing and don't have a regular job position or funding attached to assist with them. These are the things that we need to rely on the kindness of people with the time, the desire and sometimes the resources, to attend to. These people are mainly volunteers and philanthropists. Many are employed, many are parents, many are retired and many are also business owners. Often these are the people with the biggest normal everyday commitments, but they still manage to help out where they can. It doesn't always take a lot to give to those causes that ignite us and every act of giving adds to the fibre of our own being, as well as benefiting those that we desire to assist. It is a win-win choice. Help out a little and lots can happen from that.

The second reason I do what I do, is because I can. We all have things that we are good at, that we can pass on to those less fortunate and help to heal the wounds that life's dramas can inflict in the world. Everyone is capable of giving something back.

And thirdly, I do what I do because I want to. I have a desire that burns in my soul to want everyone to live a healthy, happy, more educated, connected and fulfilled life.

Over the coming weeks, I will be examining topics that I believe we all need to create clever conversations around. Things that I believe we should all be talking to each other about, communicating about on a community level, even things of world importance. The things that shape our future and that of our young people and how to help those in our community who are lost, alone or vulnerable.

I would like to hear from you, the community, about the things that make you passionate, the subjects that you need or want to know more about and the questions that leave you lost. Each week I will choose a topic from one of your letters and communicate my thoughts about it. If you have a subject that you think deserves a clever conversation, email me at cleverconversations@yahoo.com.au and lets get talking about the things that really count in our community.

Life is short, let's make it easier and let's make it matter...