It's Trump. It's heartbreak. It's getting old. It's three years of therapy twice a week. It's being humbled. It's realising your rinky-dink life isn't everyone's experience. It's having your consciousness raised that the intergenerational transmission of trauma is a real thing. It's loving something more than yourself. It's having a bucket of shit fall on your head.
Or maybe it's none of these things. Whatever it is, it breaks you. Your defences come down, not because you want to, but because you have no choice. You are down on your knees, begging for mercy. When we learn we may soon die, in that instant, the seat of our consciousness shifts. We realise the supreme emotion is love and that is all there is. Or sometimes we acquire this understanding slowly and with great difficulty.
However, you survive. Later, you find you've changed. You consider learning Te Reo. You know a lot of vegans. And you vote Labour. You become what is known as left-wing, although I find that label unhelpful.
I try not to look backwards, but for the purposes of explaining my journey from smug capitalist to delicate liberal I probably need to supply a little historical context. Years ago, last century even, I used to work for the National Business Review. I really believed in the power of the market. (I still sort of do, it's just things are more complicated than most economic models allow) I preached bootstrap-style individual responsibility. I was like a bargain basement Mike Hosking, if Mike Hosking wore a lot of red lipstick and drove a cheap Japanese import.
That long-ago self seems like a stranger to me now. When I try to understand how I lost my machismo I'm not sure what happened. It is hard to think of anyone who could get things so reliably wrong. Perhaps, I needed to feel superior, more admirably rational than anyone else? I clung onto the idea there was a grand unifying pattern to try to feel safe in an unpredictable world. I was terrified. Or I was just a selfish little s***.
