This is an open letter to all the sad children of the world, especially the ones walking around in grown up bodies trying to cope with the world as it is.

Hello, all my fellow sad children. My, but there’s a lot of us, aren’t there? It seems like you cannot browse a forum or lift a shroud these days without finding more of us. Alone and adrift in this great cruel world, we can’t seem to live but for dying, and everywhere you go, great shoals of us have run aground in the gutters.

Well, not tonight, my dears. Watch closely as I take my extremely magical chalk and draw a big, thick, bold line around all of us, and with a simple spell, I hereby declare that all that is inside the circle is safe, that our personal demons will have to wait politely outside because nothing negatives or painful is allowed inside, and it’s a party day in kindergarten all the time, and nobody has to do or feel anything they don’t want.

And now that we are all together in this great big wide sunshiny room, where everything is wonderful and happy and nothing is gloomy or sad or uncomfortable or weird, it is finally safe to talk about why we are all here, and why there are so many of us.

It doesn’t seem to make any sense, does it? How can there be so many of us floating around without a purpose or even an idea of what we want to be when we grow up, when the world, or at least the modern part of it, has never been so good? Nobody in history has lived as well as we do now. Few of us have ever wanted for food, clothing, shelter, or entertainment. We might not have gotten everything we wanted, but we got everything we needed, and so you would think we would be the happiest people who ever lived.

But if anything, we seem to be going in the opposite direction, don’t we? Filled to the gills with advice and pills, and more connected with each other via the magic of technology than ever more, yet so many of us limp through life like wounded angels who are too tired to fly, but afraid to land.

How can this be? What went wrong? How did we end up bruised and confused and afraid in a cold and lonesome world , instead of walking through the warm and supportive corridors we are sure we were promised one day?

When were we dropped off and never picked up again, and how many of us are, to this day, waiting for a minivan to come pick us up and take us to the next thing?

It can’t just be up to us…. can it? How would that be fair? Is this all going to be on the test?

And just when is the next test, anyhow? It feels like we’ve been waiting almost forever.

How is it that so many arrive at the leap into adulthood without enough momentum to reach the other side? And you know what happens then, right?

Maybe the problem is that by giving us everything they thought we would need, our parents just made all the things they couldn’t give us, or didn’t know to give us, or didn’t know how to give us, all the more evident. Maybe that is the curse of the modern age, to arrive into maturity with great energy but without anything left on the other side any more.

Maybe our parents, and their parents, tore down all that used to cushion the fall, and never even looked back to see what happened to those who came after them.

Maybe it’s not their fault, though. Maybe this is just the way it had to be for society to go forward. It would be nice to think that all our pains are just the birth pains of a new era, one where we rebuild what was destroyed, but this time, with our keen knowledge of what we are missing, we will build a new and better world, full of wamrth and love and nobody ever, ever being left all alone in the dark.

Maybe that’s our job. Maybe that’s why we’re here. We have to build the next level, and take humanity one level higher. Maybe that is all that any generation can hope to do. And maybe, just maybe, everything from the last level had to go first. Maybe those previous generations really did us all a favour, and some day history will look back at this time as the terrible and wonderful era of heroes who fought evil and built the world anew out of the bones of the past, like they did in the era of World War II.

Or maybe all us sad children, the gifted and/or afflicted, needed was a little guidance, someone who could show us the way to the next thing without necessarily forcing us to take it. Maybe before telling us all that we could be whatever we wanted to be, and then leaving us to figure out what the hell that meant, exactly, we could have been handed a few useful and practical hints.

And maybe, just maybe now, we should decide, as a society, that sometimes, settling for less is perfectly fine, and there is no sin in being perfectly ordinary.

Well, that’s enough of the Maybe Game for now, little children. I can see you all drooping in your chairs and so it’s clearly past time we all went to bed. So pick up your play mats and place them neatly on the pile, take your two cookies and your glass of milk, and head up to bed.

I will be up to tuck you all in to your warm, safe, comfortable beds and read you a wonderful bedtime story *about a magical land where nothing bad can ever happen and people are happy and good to each other all the time) in a few minutes.

And don’t worry. None of this will be on the test.