We are the demon

TL:DR

Mr. Williams,

Sorry to see you go, but I am not sure we deserved you. You were nothing more than just us, unbridled, unfettered by fear or self-consciousness. 

You could express. Nothing held it back. You had none of the fences that we use to line ourselves, to hold back our expression.. It just gushed from you. You were just us and if you had a talent, it would be to let some of it bubble, some of your energy, bubble to the surface and it was so free, it made us nervous. Some of us thought, you would explode, but there was never a chance of that because you had released. Your spirit was freed. When you smiled, you smiled, when you hugged, you hugged. When you shook a hand, you shook a hand. What frightened us was that you were you and we were you.

 You just knew how to let it go.

Everyone talked yesterday about your demons. My thought this morning is that we were the demons. Maybe not intentionally, but we were the demons. 

When we failed to express, when we failed to hug true, when we failed to smile. We were the demons. As the world has gotten smaller and smaller and we can see, in a second, in a flash, a thousand children dying, we are the demons. When we can see the twisted hate drawn from fountains of love spirit from Gods we have chosen to follow, we are the demons. When we see the blood spill again and again and again, we are the demons.

The demons may not have been inside you, the demons that forced you to the next step may have been us. I think you knew inside that when you were “on” that it was an “on” that we all had but we chose rarely to be “on.” There was no magic to you. The only magic was that you had pulled down some of the barriers, some of the fences that were built around each of us to protect us from each other and maybe from ourselves. Like this Social Media, we often think about how we will appear to those around us, carefully choose the pictures of a baby or cat or the dance of an elephant.
We are so close. We have all the opportunity that you did, but maybe we really are the demon.
I understand we are not Picasso, Hendrix, Van Cliburn, Einstein, or many of the other great expressionists that have filled our history. But you were different. You absorbed the energy and vision around you and then allowed your mind to roar like a gushing river of thoughts, sharing with us every thought from Margaret Thatcher to seeing a 3D proctoscope in a table vase and a mouse eating cream cheese. These are all images we know, all things that we had all been exposed to, but we hold them back and our failure to express, to tear down the dam and rip down the fences made us the demons in your life.

I just thought about the Heinlein book, Stranger in a Strange Land . Maybe that was you. Maybe on the next stop in the journey, expression will be as common as breathing and there will be no demons.
Someone remember to hug someone today. Remember to tell them you love and remember to be true and share a gift of a feeling. Tell someone the first thing that comes to your mind. and then the next and the next and never be afraid that they might think that you are weak, because you can open the dam and let it flow.

 

Don’t be a demon. We have too many already.