One of the advantages/caveats of long road trips by yourself is you get time with just yourself and your thoughts:
For a variety of reasons, I’ve been kind of quiet for awhile. Some of the reasons have been resolved or are passed. Others I won’t go into here – those will be addressed where and when they need to be. One of the reasons, though, has been because I’ve felt more and more disillusioned with what I see unfolding in the collective around me. Added to that was that I felt like I just couldn’t bring myself to care. Odd thing is, I’ve realized that isn’t true.
It isn’t that I didn’t or don’t care, Actually I do. The problem is that I’ve been frustrated by so much of what I see and not knowing how to share my thoughts and feelings – mainly because I knew if I did so, people wouldn’t like what I had to say.
This past weekend, I essentially returned to my roots in the community. It was good, but it was also a study in contrasts; an opportunity to look at how much things have changed both around me and within me. That I have feet in both the world of pups and handlers as well as the broader leather/kink collective only worked to add perspective to those observations.
So now I’ll just say it.
Yes, it’s human nature to resist change. In generally, we’re built to not like it. It makes us uncomfortable. Change brings with it unknowns, and uncertainty is something that we, by nature, want to avoid.
Change is here with us, every day, and it isn’t going to go away. So many in my generation have dug in and resisted change so much that we – the leather and kink collective – have become the very thing those who came before us rebelled against. We’ve built walls out of arguments in a futile attempt to defend something that was rather than keep re-seeding the ground to keep it fertile for future growth. I know a lot of people don’t want to face this, but it isn’t the younger generation ruining everything. It’s us old farts that don’t want to make room for new blood and the fresh ideas and views they bring.
The future isn’t ours alone to define. In fact, more of the future belongs to those coming behind us than those with 15, 20, or 30 years of experience in the collective. We’ve had time to leave our marks on the collective, to add to what the future can hold. But ours are not the only voices and actions that set it up.
I understand that it can be frustrating to have all that time and experience and then feel it’s being cast aside as irrelevant. No one wants to be made to feel like they don’t matter, that their experiences aren’t relevant. After all, the present that is was the future we strove to build. Of course we’re going to want to defend that.
But what’s the point of defending it if we don’t let the next generation do the same? What’s the point of defending it all if we aren’t also open to what we didn’t accomplish? Is it so difficult to accept that the next generation is bringing to the fore and addressing those things we didn’t? The world wasn’t perfect then (no matter how many arguments to the contrary), and there are bitter legacies my generation left unresolved and pushed off to the future (intentionally or not). Well, the future we set up is the next generation’s present, and they ain’t having it.
We don’t get to define what’s going to be important to the next generation. It’s their place to take what we built and decide how to best fit it to the world they’re building on top of what we’ve done.
Speaking for myself, I’ve done my fair share to add to the collective. But I realize it isn’t up to me to decide what takes hold and what doesn’t. What is up to me is knowing I did my best and that it’s time to let the new take it from here. For a time we may work side-by-side, but in the end, someone else has to continue what was begun if it’s going to last – and is worthy of being continued.
And where things won't be continued, the next generation will bring forth their ideas to fill those voids. And the generation after that will work with what is passed to them. It's a cycle that has to be allowed to grow and evolve.
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