adolescence

In my 20s I was chasing everything life has to offer, success, fame, and everything that can stroke the ego. At home on weekends means being a loser and being out means living the life. I can say that I have a fair share of success and a bit of fame but perspectives change as your view becomes wider. Between then and now, I find myself choosing something more predictable, something more quiet, something less than extraordinary like a morning cup of coffee after the kids have gone to school or my rosary enroute to work.

We have built our lives chasing the next big thing, every country to visit, every new experience to collect, every latest product to try. Experience has become a currency, a status symbol. The more you have, the better you are as a person. We have been infected, as it were, by the YOLO virus: you only live once, so fill it with as much novelty as possible.
But I wonder what happens when we do the exact opposite.

We dismiss the ordinary and the repetitive as mundane, as if life’s meaning is found only in the novel and the exciting. But consider the fisherman who casts the same net every morning. The artist who sits at the same desk, at the same hour, and paints. The chef who has cooked the same dish for decades and still finds something to improve. The mother who wakes before everyone else to prepare breakfast. The father who takes the same route to work, year after year, not because he has no imagination, but because he has people depending on him. These are not people who have given up on life. These are people who have found it.

Repetition and doing the ordinary does something to us. We become what we do repeatedly. The fisherman not only catches the fish, he learns about the sea. The mother not only makes breakfast, she becomes the person her children can count on.

The ordinary is not the enemy of meaning. It is meaning, the form meaning takes when it decides to stay.

There is something in the word itself worth holding. Routine comes from route, a road, a path worn by repeated passage. A routine, then, is not a rut. It is a road that knows you. You have walked it so many times that it remembers your weight, your pace, your pauses. It does not surprise you. It does something better: it receives you. And in that receiving, in that dailiness, mastery quietly forms.

Consider the salmon. It swims upstream against everything, spawns, and dies. But its death is not a failure. It is the final act of a complete life. Its body feeds the river, the bears, the trees, the very water that will carry the next generation. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is left over. It served its purpose fully, without remainder.
Perhaps that is what the ordinary asks of us. Not drama. Not novelty. Just to show up, to do the thing, and to feed what comes after us.

In the ordinary there is no rush, only the slow accumulation of a life that knows what it is doing. In the routine, nothing is new, but everything is deeper. We spend so much of our lives looking for somewhere to arrive, when the road beneath our feet has been the destination all along.

Are you familiar with this photo? If you have seen Adolescence, then you know.

I’ve been curious about Adolescence ever since I read a review and saw comments on social media that blamed masculinity and patriarchy for the issues portrayed in the film. I decided not to comment until I saw the film for myself. Last night, Ingrid recommended it to me, telling me there were only four episodes. I decided to watch it, and I finished the last episode this morning.

By now, many who have seen the film are already familiar with the story, so I won’t go into detail about that. However, there were four significant scenes—long dialogues in Adolescence—that are crucial for helping viewers understand the film better:

The first major scene occurs during the precinct scene, where Jamie chooses his father as the adult to accompany him. He says he chose his father because his father doesn’t judge him. Another important detail comes when Jamie tells the detectives that, on the night of the incident, he came home, and no one noticed him. His father confirms this, stating that Jamie had only just arrived 10 minutes before the police barged in.

The second pivotal scene is the interview between Jamie and the psychologist. Here, Jamie’s relationship with his father is revealed. He avoids questions about his dad, and when asked about masculinity, he repeatedly insists that he’s not gay. But more than that, the scene demonstrates how short-fused Jamie is. In just this one scene, he lashes out three times.

The third big scene takes place in the van, where Jamie’s parents talk about their dance when they were Jamie’s age. It contrasts the difference between teenagers in 1984, when Take On Me was number one, and today, in the age of social media, where bullying, pornography, and extreme ideologies are easily accessible to impressionable minds.

The final and most powerful scene is when Jamie’s parents discuss their regrets. This dialogue reveals a lot about modern parenting. The father reflects on the time when he played games with Jamie but became too busy with work after his business took off, leaving him absent from home daily, from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. He also mentions that because his own father struck him, he promised never to do the same to his children. Meanwhile, the mother’s regret was that she was often home early but failed to establish a relationship with Jamie. They both agree that they knew Jamie had a temper problem, but neither corrected nor addressed it.

The movie isn’t about patriarchy, pornography, masculinity, or a broken system. No amount of societal dysfunction can destroy a loving family. Rather, the film highlights the failure of parents to meet the emotional needs of their adolescent children. What are those needs? Relationships. Both parents failed to communicate or connect with Jamie. The father didn’t have time to build a relationship with his son, and while the mother had more time, she didn’t try to do so. This failure to form a relationship left them unable to understand the language of youth, and even to have authority over their son. Yes, in the natural order of things, parents have natural authority over their children.

In the film, there are two main culprits. If you look at the photo I posted, you’ll see them at the end of the movie: technology left unchecked with impressionable minds have harmful effects, symbolized by the arcade game and the clock, and the two Lego figures representing the parents’ time or maybe just the dad since the figure in orange surely is a man and the other is unclear. Anyway, poor Teddy.

Not everyone has the privilege of having both a father and a mother, but beyond parenting and parents having authority over their kids, children also need good role models. The movie calls on adults to take responsibility for being positive role models, to show what good men and women should be, and to have a clear understanding of objective truths. This leads to presence, the most important thing a parent or adult can offer.