Finding The Lost

by Michael Gray Griffith: Cafe Locked Out

There are few incidents that bring people together like the news of a lost child. The views of the helicopter combing the forest, the lines of SES volunteers, their heads down, their orange hi vis vests like beacons of hope to all our fears.

In my time I have not spent a lot of time in one place. Lots of different schools, jobs, lots of different places, lived and forgotten. It’s why the Deplorables trip was so pleasurable. I was used to it. I love moving, more than arriving. I could have kept going for years.

To avoid loneliness, I learned, as a child who was regularly the new kid in school, to connect with strangers quickly, and because I had no history with them, and was not connected to their networks, they were often comfortable opening up to me, deeply. Releasing pains they were expected to keep in around the people they knew.

Many of these stories I wove into my plays, often verbatim, and then would be surprised to how audiences would be entranced and or deeply moved by these stories and anecdotes, as though they were listening to clues, or at least hints to the mysteries of this life.

But tonight, before I wrote this, it occurred to me, that many Australians are lost children, hidden beyond reach in the thick forest of their social skin. And most will not only never be found, but most will never be listed as missing.

I hear this in the comments of people talking about people who have killed themselves. The ones where no one has any idea why these people left. Often these are popular people, and yet somewhere inside them their lost child must have accepted the fact that they would never be found.

Covid didn’t create this, it just accentuated it. It was like the powers that be, as they separated us, and began socially ostracizing anyone who refused to group think, were calling in all the search parties.

I doubt we’ll ever know how many people we lost to this, but I do know that we will lose more, not to adverse reactions, but to the price our new authoritarian society is demanding of it citizens. Silence and compliance.

Free Speech is more than a right, it is your only hope of saving yourself from the prison of conformity. It’s the voices of the search party calling your name in the cold labyrinth many of us will never escape. And the gift that it gives you, when you truly embrace your rescuer’s hand, which will be your own hand, is the ability for you to be you.

Liberation can only occur when you find the courage to be yourself.

Currently I am being advised to go back into my forest, to hide my own views and discoveries of love and life, for they don’t align with the presiding Woke commandments.

But I can’t do that. For the struggle to find the courage to be myself was too arduous and long. And once you are out, all the nerve endings that had been suppressed, not only emerge, but start devouring all the moments that make your life, with the realisation of what each of these moments truly are, miraculous gifts that we will never comprehend or understand.

Each of us, if we can escape the forest, can be the explorers of our brief time.

And while those who might never escape will try their best to get you to return to being lost, in order to justify their own cowardice, your rescuer, you, will gift you, before you emerge, two words that you can use to keep them all at bay. “Fuck You.”

And all of this rhetoric can be summed up in one truly beautiful word, “Freedom.”

The true benefit of living in a democracy, why people in our past created, and defended it, is the freedom to be YOU.

And as I write these last paragraphs I can hear the hopes of those yet to be born. They are pleading to you, to all of us, to not give this great gift over. For even now, pre their history, I can sense the fear they have of being born into slavery.

You, now, are not a slave, but they are intending to enslave you. And you are only as lost as you choose to be. So in this critical point in human history, choose well, for while those who choose to be forever lost will inevitably be forgotten in the statistics of this era, the self-found are the only ones who will have the possibility of lighting our way forward, beacons of hope that others will follow, like sailors lost on a dark sea, will navigate their way by the stars.

Michael Gray Griffith

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