There is window of opportunity in our lives that is unlike any other. It is those teenage years when our hormones are bouncing around inside us like the mania of LA freeway traffic, zipping and colliding all over the place.
Our parents are still for the most part looking after us – feeding us, providing a place for us to sleep and absorbing responsibilities like a mortgage. Children and having to be accountable to work are things only boring older people have to contend with. It’s that intoxicating concoction of relative freedom, hormonal explosions and a sense that a new world has opened up that leaves us paradoxically horny as hell and at the same time self-conscious and craving to be seen, noticed, validated.
At least that was my teenage experience!
I work with Soar (soar.ie). Two of us started it and now it is a movement powered by the young people it was created to serve. The aim was to ignite the next generation of young people to create their own destiny, an incubator for the raw latent potential that lies within young people waiting to be acknowledged and then given fertile soil to flourish in.
I believe the great sadness of life is people dying with their music still in them – unrealised. The travesty for young people is that they are pregnant with possibility but it is often lost because they never had an environment to explore it in.
Young people have so much to teach us.
We can get very afraid as we get older. We take on the persona of responsible mothers and fathers parenting children of our own and sometimes parenting our own parents and all the while forgetting about the young teenager within us that wants to say the wrong thing at the inappropriate time and dance and write poetry and paint and fall in love and out of love in the same day and be be wild.
You know the type of energy I am talking about, even if you forget that it once filled your body you recognise it on the street when you see a group of teenagers together. But we learn how to be in control of ourselves as adults and we lose something very valuable in the process.
At this stage I have been exposed to 15,000 young people through our workshops in Ireland and also teenagers in Australia and the US. There is an incredibly similar thread that I have seen again and again across race, gender and geography. That is the level of insight and wisdom young people intuitively hold and will share when they feel the environment is safe enough to do so and that they won’t be judged.
Young people have a laser sharp antennae for environments or people where they know their truth or honest opinion on life could be judged. They are so intelligent, very often unconsciously so about who they trust with their wisdom.
Life can be challenging. We know this. We learn most about ourselves and our consciousness evolves most, just like muscles do, when we are stretched beyond what feels comfortable.
One of the things we forget as we take on the personas of responsible adults is how to be young, how to be childlike. There is so much to be gained from reclaiming the essence of that wild and uncertain stage in all our lives that accompanied many of our firsts – our first kiss, our first date, our first car, our first time having sex, our first festival, our first realisation that your parents weren’t looking over your shoulder any longer and you could be who you wanted to be.
This is where teenagers have so much to teach us. They can help us reclaim a part of our selves that we may have forgotten exists and therefor have lost. Talk to young people you meet on the street or nieces or nephews you may have. Ask them what life is like for them and what it’s like to be a teenager in Ireland. If you are willing to not judge them but rather marvel at their wild beauty you will be the one that receives the gift.
About Soar
Soar is a collective movement which believes that there is greatness within all young people. We act on this by creating and delivering early intervention-preventative wellness workshops inside and outside of the school system for young people aged 12 to 18 years from all backgrounds. For more information go to Soar.ie
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We rely on the generosity of the public to fund our work and so far together we have achieved great things! Please do continue to support us so we can provide future generations in Ireland with the resources to recognise and talk about their emotions, and equip them to navigate the ever-changing world around them as they grow
