It’s like watching a TV special about media affecting culture. You don’t realize you’re in a play within a play until much later, maybe never.
Could it be that life works the same way? We try to understand it from the context of living it. Is it possible to be unbiased when examining our choices within an environment that creates (and limits) those choices?
Using the word conundrum is so tempting, but we’d be back in a box again. One where communication is only as good as the vocabulary we share. It’s like a Yogi Berra quote that leaves you hanging. One of my favorites:
“Think! How the hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?”
A possible answer lies in quicksand, where escape is counterintuitive, demanding relaxation instead of panic, breathing deep instead of fast and thinking with a clear mind so you can be aware enough to take action:
To be simple in the whole, total process of our consciousness is extremely arduous; because there must be no inward reservation, there must be an eagerness to find out, to inquire into the process of our being, which means to be awake to every intimation, to every hint; to be aware of our fears, of our hopes, and to investigate and to be free of them more and more and more. Only then, when the mind and the heart are really simple, not encrusted, are we able to solve the many problems that confront us.
Knowledge is not going to solve our problems. You may know, for example, that there is reincarnation, that there is a continuity after death. You may know, I don’t say you do; or you may be convinced of it. But that does not solve the problem. Death cannot be shelved by your theory, or by information, or by conviction. It is much more mysterious, much deeper, much more creative than that.
Zorba invoked a very specific feeling for me: FREEDOM. Reading it as I got situated into life again in New York, it provided me the sense of escape from reality I had on my trip to India. The feeling that life goes on without you. And how comfortable that is, because you’re free to do what you like and truly understand how your unique ripple affects the flow of things.
Apathy has become such a vice and the majority of time I believe it is. Occasionally though, you get a glimpse of the beauty within apathy, seeing in it not despair but rather a serene peace knowing that if nothing matters, then you can simply be yourself.
Zorba keeps at this theme with a nonchalant frivolity of letting things be and being one with them by letting yourself be. You get the feeling that you can’t understand something by controlling it. Instead you must set yourself free of the biases surrounding you and understand where you personally stand. Realize where your confidence comes from so when the storm comes you know if and how you’ll weather it. You can’t understand life so free yourself to the chaos it presents. Don’t try to find order. Try to find your internal meaning because reality may change and you have to be ready for it.
I got all of that from Zorba and much more. I purposefully didn’t finish it because I want to nakedly go back in to bathe in that feeling. To come out of the subway knowing my mind will breathe fresher air for having read it for 10 minutes.
John Robb’s links alone would suffice in connecting you to the myriad future world. Here’s a recent link to predictions for the decade ahead by Kazys Varnelis. Reading it in entirety is worthwhile but draining. I left feeling potentially optimistic and assuredly pessimistic. Lots of “ifs”. Here are the highlights:
China will start slowing. The United States, EU, the Mideast and East Asia will all make up a low growth block, a slowly decaying imperium. India, together with parts of Africa and South America, will be on the rise. To be clear: the very worst thing that could happen is that we would see otherwise.
I disagree on most counts here. China’s manufacturing of inelastic goods is too entrenched for it to slow. East Asia is lower growth post-recession but they are also more recession-proof due to their “immateriality” (as mentioned in the post) and service good production. India and Africa are too rife with corruption and dependent on non-resident financial funding to thrive on their own. The reverse brain drain is helping them out, but for how long?
A greater divide will open up between three classes. At the top, the super-rich will continue controlling national policies and will have the luxury of living in late Roman splendor. A new “upper middle” class will emerge among those who were lucky enough to accumulate some serious cash during the glory days. Below that will come the masses, impossibly in debt from credit cards, college educations, medical bills and nursing home bills for their parents but unable to find jobs that can do anything to pull them out of the mire.
So much of this is self-created. The party of the 1990s and 2000s (again, credit goes to the author) and even the “progressive” consumer spending of the baby boomers has brought us to this point. Many went into debt willingly expecting a positive ROI in the end, unaware of the champagne glass tower their investments were built on. While trust in financial structures is all but gone, the mental shift from consumption to value still hasn’t occurred, primarily due to the “upper middle” class continuing with business as usual.
Some cities are simply doomed, but if we’re lucky, some leaders will turn to intelligent ways of dealing with this condition. To me, the idea of building the world’s largest urban farm in Detroit sounds smart. Look for some of these cities—Buffalo maybe?—to follow Berlin’s path and become some of the most interesting places to live in the country…
…These cities will not see real estate values increase greatly. The new classes populating them will not be rich, but rather will turn to a of new DIY bohemianism, cultivating gardens, joining with neighbors communally and building vibrant cultural scenes.
What struck me was the mention of Buffalo, where I lived for the past few years. Cost of living is certainly an attraction and if you’re not into global arbitrage, it’s a great option on the national scale (same language, same culture, no need to adopt/adapt). With dilapidated storefronts ready to be revamped, a large elderly AND student population and shoestring entrepreneurship on the rise, there’s a lot of promise. Fresh blood needs to pour in waves though because of the conservative, revisionist mentality that still holds these kinds of cities back.
The divisions in politics will grow. By the end of the decade, the polarization within countries will drive toward hyper-localism. Nonpartisan commissions will study the devolution of power to local governments in areas of education, individual rights (abortion will be illegal in many states, guns in many others), the environment, and so on. In many states gay rights will become accepted, in others, homosexuality may become illegal again.
Hyper-localism is happening right now in “green” communities, spa-like baby-boomer villages, and open-source networks (think small; journalism to blogosphere for example). In Gladwell terms, it’s 10-15 years away from achieving critical mass, and when it “tips”, the trending will drive away those who began it to either accumulate wealth quickly and estrange themselves from the crowds or go back to creating mini oligopoly-like systems of government to hold onto power. Early adoption will become a skill.
As Varnelis iterates several times cautiously, this is a fun exercise blogs like to get into. It does shape bias mindsets of readers to a certain degree so being involved signals the belief that your voice is your vote. The U.S., being beat up so often based on Rome-downfall analogies, trumps Rome on the spectrum of freedom of speech. The internet only enhances that freedom. Take a bath in information and you don’t know what you’ll come out with. Join the fun.
You showcase and you prepare to showcase. The latter builds character, strength, perseverance, confidence, yet it’s the former that’s judged, rewarded, critiqued and talked about. There’s an enormous amount of pressure to reach the end goal when the process is much more valuable. The end is a fabricated expectation that gets you to do the things that make you who you are. Usually people become the versions of themselves they want to be (or others want them to be) well before they reach their destination. The word, “perfectionist”, is an unfortunate result of people working to exact measures of success that, once achieved, leave them wanting for more. More they have to fabricate once again.
If you quit, make a mistake or get lost, it’s your recovery not your breakdown that matters. My piano teacher taught me to practice how to continue when I slipped, because she said, “what makes a master pianist is no one notices when he hiccups.”
A results-oriented culture tips the favor to those who are naturally meticulous and driven. A theme or mission or goal creates a dividing line between the haves and the have nots, defined relative to the what that society values. Can you make the cut? And if you can’t, why do you stay?
There’s a conflict of interest to note here. I love watching Dinner:Impossible, those “making-of” shows on Discovery and reading howstuffworks.com. I’m naturally a process guy and hence I’d prefer a world much more process-oriented. There is certainly self-interest involved in this post and that bias is echoed throughout the blog. Recognizing this, I make an effort to understand the reasoning behind result-orientation, though I usually come up lacking. The winners write history and it goes without saying that the more active, driven and goal-minded have primarily been the authors. The internet offers each one of us a voice to create the history we see in the moment, and this is mine.
I sometimes wonder whether this question deserves thinking time or whether it takes time away from actually doing things. Considering the sinusoidal nature of life, if there’s a question worth thinking about in the down periods, this takes priority. And DailyOM (the inspiring catalyst) provides the recipe for thinking about it. Read the whole thing, but the last sentence is my favorite part.
“Who am I?” is a timeless mantra, a Zen koan ultimately designed to lead us home, into the part of our minds that finally lets go of questions and answers and finds instead the ability to simply be.
November 13th, 2009 The Heart of Unknowing
Who am I?
At some point in our lives, or perhaps at many points in our lives, we ask the question, “Who am I?” At times like these, we are looking beyond the obvious, beyond our names and the names of the cities and states we came from, into the layers beneath our surface identities. We may feel the need for a deeper sense of purpose in our lives, or we may be ready to accommodate a more complex understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves. Whatever the case, the question of who we are is a seed that can bear much fruit.
It can send us on an exploration of our ancestry, or the past lives of our soul. It can call us to take up journaling in order to discover that voice deep within us that seems to know the answers to a multitude of questions. It can draw our attention so deeply inward that we find the spark of spirit that connects us to every living thing in the universe. One Hindu tradition counsels its practitioners to ask the question over and over, using it as a mantra to lead them inevitably into the heart of the divine.
While there are people who seem to come into the world knowing who they are and why they are here, for the most part the human journey appears to be very much about asking this question and allowing its answers to guide us on our paths. So when we find ourselves in the heart of unknowing, we can have faith that we are in a very human place, as well as a very divine one. “Who am I?” is a timeless mantra, a Zen koan ultimately designed to lead us home, into the part of our minds that finally lets go of questions and answers and finds instead the ability to simply be.
Why don’t you take a good look at yourself and describe what you see, and baby, baby, baby, do you like it?
There you sit, sitting spare like a book on a shelf rustin’,
ah, not trying to fight it.
You really don’t care if they’re comin’; oh, oh,
I know that it’s all a state of mind.
It breaks old habits. Especially those learned in stress, during times you couldn’t control and reacted to instead.
Personally, I’ve made great strides stopping myself from biting my nails and cracking my knee. These simple but annoying habits were a natural part of my day and signaled various emotional states; nervousness, hunger, exhaustion, so on. The sabbatical has eliminated the cause – the root stressors – which in turn got rid of the effect – the bad habit.
Will they reemerge? Most likely. Yet I have a deeper understanding of how relative a state of mind really is. It’s a matter of time and place. Your context affecting your self. Change your setting and you change how you react, how you feel. I’m counting on this to make a difference.
Regardless of what religion might represent to each individual person, the prayer process resonates with positive thought. Whenever I walk into a church, mosque, temple, synagogue or any religious site, that “holy” feeling symbolizes to me a collection of positivity externalized by a group of strangers brought together by a common belief.
The wrongs (and rights) done in the name of religion are primarily territorial. Never-ending land rights contests legitimized by religious fervor (i.e. the Middle East), community building exercises aimed to fill a lacking need (i.e. schools), festivals celebrating the harvest (i.e. Thanksgiving) or gatherings invoking rain for the harvest (i.e. Zuni rain dance).
While the above activities may be religiously selfish, prayer seems to have its own place outside of religion. People pray whether they’re religious or not, and it’s generally of a positive nature. Of course there are individuals who may pray for another’s downfall, but I’d like to think they’re in the minority. People tend to pray for money, health, love, happiness, and support for themselves or others.
When you think of the millions of unfocused thoughts that flit through our brains daily, the idea of prayer as a direct, clear, positive thought has a powerful energy to it. I don’t pray very often, yet when I’m surrounded by people who do (any religious place), the sense of purpose astounds me. I feel a communal longing for something more.
A single person’s prayer has a vibe of dependency; hoping another will fulfill what you believe you can’t do. As a collective though, that combined hope becomes a positive externality of prayer and religion as a whole.
Settling is the key word. Once we have X number of things we are set, we’ve made it. The status quo: a family, a house with a backyard, a dog, cars, TVs, possessions, wealth. Do you actually need these things or have you convinced yourself that you want them?
What don’t you need that you think you want?
There are people who do want the societal status quo (or portions of it). There are those who rebel against it because, well, they’re rebels and they need something to be against. There are those who want to provide others the opportunity to achieve the status quo. Those that want to build something new. Those that want to sleepwalk through it all. Those that want to be engaged fully in everything. Those that want to communicate. Love. Cherish. Hate. Heal. Discover. Run. Escape. Observe. Just be.
