Finally, Some Value in Their ABC

You'll know it's not my habit to watch their ABC.

In fact, if it happens to be within earshot, I am often reduced to contradicting their propaganda out loud, sometimes alarming those around me.

That's why I claim not to have really watched it for years.

To me, it's an anti-Australian waste of taxpayers money.

That said, I came home from the gym a couple of nights ago and the tail end of the 7.30 program was airing.

Clearly I was too exhausted to complain to my wife and the broadcast ticked over to Australian Story.

The feature was an interview by Leigh Sales with musician Nick Cave.

Now I admit to knowing nothing about Nick Cave but his immaculate suit and serious demeanour caught my attention. To me he looked more investment banker than rock star.

What followed was one of the most interesting and thought provoking 30 minutes of television that I have enjoyed in ages.

Sales probed Cave on his early years dealing with substance abuse, what success actually means and how his famous self-absorption was tragically broken.

Cave admitted that he was "in awe of my own genius" until his 15 year old son died in a drug related accident.

Like anyone who has experienced such grief and anguish, the loss of a child caused an immediate change in Cave's perspective.

He told Sales "I just saw the folly of that ... disgraceful sort of self-indulgence." 

However, tragedy visited the Cave household again when another son died years later. He was just 31 and had experienced some personal struggles.

His death caused even further introspection from Nick Cave.

"We eventually absorb, or rearrange ourselves, so that we become creatures of loss as we get older; this is part of our fundamental fabric of what we are as human beings.

This is not a tragic element to our lives but rather a deepening element and that brings incredible meaning into our life. I've found that personally, and I think a lot of other people have found that, provided you can remain open."

I struggled with how this man found such inner strength after experiencing extraordinary emotional turmoil and avoided returning to the mind-numbing substance abuse of his youth.

It was then that I learned Cave had embraced Christianity.

He said:

"After Arthur died, not immediately, it's been quite a while now, but rather than feeling anger ... or rejecting that sort of stuff, I felt a slow movement towards a religious life that I've found extremely helpful." 

Not content with helping himself, Cave set about helping others through a website called Red Hand Files.

It's an unfiltered Q&A with a deeply contemplative musical genius and his fans. On it, Cave answers a question every week covering an extraordinary depth of knowledge about life, the universe and everything.

It makes for fascinating reading. Here's a recent response covering loneliness.

The Cave interview made for remarkable television (for me at least) and gave me pause for thought about what we celebrate as success and a reminder of what is truly important.

It took a double dose of tragedy for one man to find a better path and perhaps his greatest gift is that he's now sharing that knowledge with the rest of us, in the hope we may adopt it without undergoing a similar experience.

“I don’t have answers beyond my own experiences, which have taught me that loneliness is not simply down to our circumstances or whether others love us. Rather, it is an indisposition of the spirit brought about, in the main, by certain aspects of our lives that have been unintentionally left untended. Loneliness and lack of meaning seem to inhabit the same dark orbit. Loneliness is the breakdown of the overarching structure of things, a feeling of separateness or exclusion from the sum and substance of the world.
Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files