Gotta, Gotta, Who Cares

"This is going to sound a little obsessive, this is going to sound a little bit strange."

With those words one of my favorite Everclear songs, 'Unemployed Boyfriend,' begins.  It is a song about a guy coming up to a girl at the welfare office and telling her that she'll be 'the mother of my children someday.' The song is bracketed by a voicemail that the girl is leaving for her sister, about how this crazy thing happened, but that she is really excited about it.  It is a fun song, but it is a little obsessive, it is a little bit strange.  Because that's the way obsession is.

The other day I was having a conversation about the movie Brave and about animation in general.  The girl I was talking to was telling me how her cousin or nephew or friend's kid [honestly I don't remember the relationship connection] kept having a new thing that they really liked to watch.  For the little boy it was Handy Manny or Wow Wow Wubbzy or Spiderman or Diego or...  And it got me thinking about how quickly we can become obsessive about something.  You see most children have short attention spans for their obsessions, it is rare that a toddler will latch on to one thing and only love that one thing forever, and I am not talking about a blanket which some of us do latch onto for a long time, just like Linus.  No, we go from one thing to the next thing loving dinosaurs today and firemen tomorrow and next week it is going to be superheroes [of which I believe firemen are real world ones].  This is not a problem for little kids, the problem is that obsession does not end once we start to go to school or college or get married or have children of our own.

In addition being obsessive is not necessarily a bad thing.  I am obsessed with certain movies and certain bands and as long as I don't become a stalker or set aside my whole life in order to devote it to one of those things it is all well and good.  The issue becomes when we do step over the boundaries that we should have in our lives and entertain thoughts and live out actions that we have no right to have in the first place.  How many lives have been destroyed because we allowed ourselves to become obsessive about a relationship?

Just yesterday morning I was up in my home office when a car alarm started to go off.  I looked out my window and saw someone standing next to a car outside.  At first I wondered why they didn't shut it off, but then the guy pulled on and broke one of the back windows, strange, I thought, but maybe his keys were locked inside and he couldn't wait for someone to come and unlock the car.  But then the guy went to the other side of the car and pulled the other back window until it broke as well, then he just started walking away.  An hour or so later when I left, there were two cops outside, one talking to a lady and the other looking at the car, the cop by the car [which was parked next to mine] said that it was a domestic disturbance.  What causes that kind of response to a problem, what causes that kind of obsession?

When our obsessions start to damage the things and people around us we have crossed that boundary that I was writing about a little bit ago.  Some obsessions are all right, some can turn downright deadly, other can be positive.  I wrote about the movie The Way in a blog a bit ago.  That is one of the movies that I am currently obsessed with.  It is a great story, about a guy walking a pilgrimage in order to atone for his actions with his son.  Up until I watched the movie I had never heard of the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage that the man takes, but now that I have I am obsessed with it.  I hope to one day be able to take that same pilgrimage, to walk where both believers and seekers have walked, in order to find something that maybe I miss in my day to day life.  It won't be soon and it won't be cheap, it will take me years to save up the money and years to be able to find the time, but one day I hope to walk those steps, see those people, and find what is out there.  [Come to think about it, maybe I should start a kickstarter campaign]

It's possible that I may never actually take that walk though.  It's possible that much like other obsessions of mine, like climbing Everest or becoming Batman, it may just fade away given time. Because some obsessions do, usually to be  taken over by the next one.  The task then is not to try and forgo obsessions, but rather to find the ones that make you a better person instead of a worse one.  May we all be able to tell the difference so we can make a difference.

Peace and Love,
Pastor K