Love Can Be Enough

Guest post by Emma Tobin 

Love Can Be Enough 

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

There are tragedies in human history that cannot be captured in words, calamities that have ravaged the world in fire and bombs, evil that we can hardly comprehend stretching ghostly fingers over our sleeping homes. As humans, we are awfully flawed, but we do have some redeeming qualities, light that makes these memories feel survivable. For all that we feel compelled to kill and maim and hate one another, we have also found something called love.

The universe is filled with bright stars and things as pleasant as coffee and baths and spices, but nothing our human hands have created can ever quite amount to that moment - you feel it juddering between your ribs - when you realise that you love something, or someone, more than you could ever hate them. Oh, and love has cracks and edges, but it swallows you, like a dragon with its great lolling tongue of complications.

Love isn’t wound dressing, it doesn’t make scars fade or turn our lives into magic kingdoms complete with frolicking unicorns and confetti, but it does make a difference. When old grief comes skulking back there’s a hand to hold, a voice that holds our heart in its lilt to soothe the throbbing in our souls. We spend a lot of our time thinking about love, be it love for a person or love for the way that the stars poke through clouds to light up dark places. It’s a human affliction, and as much as it aches, it’s also the most important thing we possess.

As much as love is terrifying and sharp and potentially ruinous, without it we couldn’t have things like poetry and art and dragons. There’s a reason why George Orwell uses romance as the greatest wad of spit in the face of totalitarianism, because love is personal and powerful, and the greatest act of rebellion against an unkind universe is to love anyway, love despite scars and tragedies, love not in order to forget but to dignify the value of human life lost. Love can drive us crazy and prop us up and pull us down, and like anything important it doesn’t have to mean the same thing to everyone.

Some people find love in books, some in numbers, some in people and some in religion. Some people love coffee. The luckiest people find love in themselves. Love is smiling stupidly and hearing your heart shudder your ribs with its surety. Love is when someone says your name like they mean it, when they look at you like you’re more interesting than their shoes. When they forget that anything else exists but you.

I’ve always thought that the most important lesson we can learn from religious faith is that love prevails. I adore the uncompromising belief in children that the one definite thing that God means is love. They see God in their family and their friends and in the things they like to do. Sometimes I think we don’t need to make it more complicated than that. Capitalism has made life all about success, be it financial success or academic success, but when it comes down to it, love is more important than all of that. Love is the root of passion and belief and art.

It’s easy to forget that success does not always have to mean what the world tells you it means. It can mean finding a fantastic book to read or making a new friend or the perfect cup of tea. And love, likewise, is up to you, defined by you. Just because it isn’t drenched in dramatic overtures with sundry explosions in the background doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be the centre of the universe your eyes create. So what if you scratched the car? You have a small pet at home who greets you with wide eyes and bounteous excitement. So what if you’ve got stretch marks and tired eyes? You have peaceful sleeping and peach-scented moisturiser in your future.

The world endeavours to convince us that love is a function, like eating and sleeping, but sometimes, when nothing else makes sense, love can be enough.

 

 Emma Tobin 

January 2015 

Being Young

Guest post by Emma Tobin

Being young today isn’t easy, because it means being massively stereotyped, it means being prejudiced against. We’re viewed with scorn because of what we do, because we spend time on Facebook and Twitter and because we don’t give our elders respect they haven’t earned. We’re seen as a bunch of atheists who live in a world where evil is glorified, where violence reigns supreme. We can’t shop in large groups, because we’re seen as a threat.

That’s the brush we’re tarred with, and that’s what’s expected of us. We have opinions, we’re smarter than people give us credit for, yet still it’s presumed that we are slaves to fashion and the constant victims of peer pressure. We’re viewed as invertebrates - bowing under social pressure, unable to stand on our own two feet, more likely than not to drink and take drugs.

That’s not who we are. We are the people who will have to search for peace, because we know that war is no longer the answer to every little problem, we know that bombing each other is not the only way to settle an argument. We’ve grown up in a world plagued with nuclear threat on all sides. Everyone is packing now, because for a long time that’s been the only way to be safe; the promise of mutual annihilation. We’re the people who will have to find a cure for cancer, who will continue to save and preserve human life.

We are not the people who will waste away in virtual worlds; we are the people who will take virtual reality further than anyone has gone before. We will make the future masterpieces in film, we will write the classics of the future; we will be the pop stars, the rock stars, the singer/songwriters of the future. We are not the dirt under your shoe, we are the ground that will hold you up when you grow old, we are the people who will actually give you your pensions. We will be the honest bankers; we will speak the words that will change the world.
We are the young, and the stupid, but we are not delinquents, and we do not deserve your condescension, your mistrust. We will learn from your mistakes and build a better world for ourselves. Right now, we’re the people you think you can look down on, but in a few years we’ll be you, and you have a choice to teach us to appreciate the young people who will take our place, or to be just like you. You are the people with the choice to make. You have the power to empower us, and to empower future generations.

Being young has never been easy, but it doesn’t have to be impossible and it doesn’t have to be so hard that we do everything in our power to escape it. You can give us the power to be noticed, to be heard, make us responsible people who don’t need to turn to alcohol to feel grown-up, who don’t need to turn to drugs to escape the world you’ve made for us. You were young once. I mean, you’re the people that The Breakfast Club is based on, so you know how we feel. We’re not criminals, we’re the start of a new age, and you have to accept that even though we seem alien, we’re going through the same things that you did.

We strike out against the world because it seems to close in on us, drowning us in rules and quashing our every attempt to express who we are, who we’re turning into. We don’t walk around shops wondering what to steal; we wonder what will look good on us. We don’t look at you and see victims; we look at you and see people who were just like us once, just as scared and confused, turning to music to make us feel alive because we don’t quite know how to live yet.

We’ve had it proven to us one hundred times over that children can’t rule the world, and we’re not asking you to hand over the reins to us. We just want the right to grow up in a world that appreciates us, that really listens to us and that isn’t so afraid of us that we have to be ruled with an iron fist. This is your world right now, but one day it will be ours, and you need to consider just what you want the future rulers of the world to be like.

Do you want them to be criminals, or do you want them to be smart, confident people who aren’t afraid of becoming like you?

Ends

May 2013

Emma Tobin is my daughter and she is 16.

7 simple rules for protecting my 15 year old online

Parents have to get involved with their children when it comes to using any sort of online space.

Would you give your 15 year old the keys of your car and just say 'off with you'? 
I don't think so! Yet so many parents are giving their kids smartphones, wifi access at home, laptops etc and yet they are not teaching them how to use them, how to behave online. 

Kids need to be given a set of rules about using any sort of online space:

My simple rules are:

1. Permission: My 15 year old is not allowed to join any new social media or other site without talking to me first 

2. Facebook: 

• She has been shown how to set her privacy settings to the max, shown where to go and what to do if someone manages to get to her with anything sinister, 
• She is only allowed to be friends with people she actually knows and is friends with
• She has been told not to post or tell anyone where she lives and to never meet anyone as a result of a connection online. 
• She has to stay friends with me on Facebook so as I can check over her shoulder so to speak every so often to make sure things are okay with her page. This is not about spying, it's not about intruding. It's about keeping her safe. 

In the last number of months she is using Facebook less and less as she says much of what is on it is nonsense and superficial. 

3. Twitter: I let her go onto Twitter this year and again many of the same rules apply here. I also gave her a full tutorial about it before she was allowed to tweet.

4. Acceptable behaviour: I explained to her what acceptable behaviour is on any/all social media sites and that she should never go onto a social media site when she is angry about something. Let them know that they do not have to take or put up with nasty comments or threats to them on any social media platform or in real life. Make them understand what is/is not acceptable behaviour online and in real life. Tell them to come to you with event the smallest concern and to NEVER let things escalate and get out of hand. Make sure you make time to hear them and to really listen.

5. Get onto social media yourself: My daughter knows that I am immersed in and knowledgeable about social media and that I understand it. The only reason I initially joined Facebook was to be one step ahead of the kids. If your kids are going on social media then you as the parent should be on it too.  

If you are allowing your kids on social media then you have to be there too to advise them and to protect them. If you are online then you might spot and stop something developing into an issue for them. 

6. Do not ban them from social media: I don’t think the answer is to keep your kids off social media as they will just find a way to be on it on a friend’s phone or at school. The key is to teach them about it, to tell them what is/isn’t acceptable behaviour online and to give them rules and instruction in how to use it.

7. One final piece of advice. Teach your children how to do a screen grab/screenshot so if they are bullied or if someone is behaving inappropriately towards them, they can screen grab the evidence. The instructions on how to take a screen shot follow:

Taking a Screenshot

To take a screen shot please complete the following steps:

For Windows
Press the "Print Screen" button.
Open Microsoft Paint. To do this, click Start > All Programs > Accessories > Paint.
Click inside the white part of the screen.
Go to the Edit menu and select Paste.
Click File > Save As.
In the box that pops up, change the "Save As" type to JPG.
After typing in a filename for your image, choose a location on your hard drive to save to, like the Desktop, and click "Save."

For Mac OS X
Simultaneously hold down the ⌘-Shift-4 keys.
Press the spacebar.
Click the open window that you wish to take a screen shot of. The screen shot should appear as a file on the desktop labeled "Picture 1."
Please note that in Mac OS X 10.6, the file is "Screen shot [date] at [time]."

For iPhone
Simultaneously press and hold the power and home buttons.
The screen will momentarily flash white.
The screenshot will appear in your "Camera Roll" album.

Use your phone's camera

Most kids now have a camera on their phone and if they are panicked and forget how to do a screen grab then get them to take a quick photo with their camera phone.

As a parent I can't bear the thought of another young life being lost because of cyber bullies and my heart goes out to that family – those two families who lost their beautiful daughters to cyber bullies in the last couple of weeks. 

It makes me very angry that the parents of the cyber bullies did not know where their children were online and what they were doing. Perhaps they didn’t care…..

It’s time to get serious parents and to know where your children are and what they are doing online. No one is going to do it for you so please take the time to teach, to monitor and to protect your children online.