“It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.” — Soren Kiefkegaard
There is a plague ravaging the United States, and in it, many of the other illnesses lie. Our people suffer from enormous imbalance and the impact of that is negatively impacting our financial states, our temperments, and our overall health and welfare, individually and as a nation.
Just look around you, folks. People are eating themselves to death; chronically exhausted; and desperately seeking “quick fixes” in order to feel better or, in fact, feel anything at all that makes their lives worth living. Where is the good in all of this? I, daresay, there isn’t any. So busy are we building robots that we are becoming them.
How did we get to a point where our children have less to look forward to than we? I believe much of the issue can be found in the following three points. Ponder them and tell me know what you think:
1. We’ve become drunk on ego, then call this “intelligence” – Much of what I see happening around us today mimics that of adolescent behavior. Instead of accepting certain absolutes about life, the planet, and humanity as a whole, many people spend an excruciating amount of time dictating to anyone who will listen why the truth found in those elements actually “isn’t”.
They deny thousands of years of reality, consistency, and wisdom and replace it with concrete, irrefutable facts and their own flawed thinking. Then they shove both down other’s throat, believing their new-found formula can bypass actual “truth.”
Basically, they think they are smarter, that facts and fervor negate all else.Yet, somehow, that assumption is digging them and future generations into a hole, one much worse than ours. Hmmm….
2. We’ve moved too far from out roots – Flying home from a recent trip, I had the good fortune of seeing the documentary, “The Biggest little Farm”. I urge every one of you to see it and if you have kids (ages nine and above) place them in front of the television too. It is about a husband and wife team who undertake a dream of theirs in the form of a self-sustaining farm.
Remiss of manufactured pesticides and unnatural, harmful behaviors, these two (with the help of many others) take a large clump of compacted, dead soil and turn it into a mecca, filled with fruit trees, vegetables, animals and more. They commit to working within the laws of nature as they bring this farm to life.
The hurdles were many and immense as was the pain of realizing on more than one occasion that “they just may have bitten off more than they could chew.” In the end, it was those very uncertainties and difficulties that, ultimately, led the duo to success…well, those combined with passion and love anyway.
There is no better metaphor for life, in my opinion. And yet, we live at a time when we are convinced that pain and hardship are purely our nemeses and need to be masked or avoided at all cost. Our progress in this regard seems misdirected and highly detrimental to our growth, confidence, and future, if not the beauty and peace we seek for ourselves and our world. “Back to the basics” we should consider going as we measure each new step forward.
3. We are drowning in everyone else’s information – We are consumed by outside information – some of it good; some of it bad – but all of it in mass proportion to what we can reasonably handle. To that end, this information combined with the strict “unforgiving” tone pervasive in our society today makes it nearly impossible to remain connected to the more intuitive side of human beings and human nature.
We live so far ‘removed’ from ourselves that we barely even recognize what makes each of us tick. As we strive to remain informed, we do so at the expense of learning anything real about ourselves. We know more about the Dow, the dumb tweet, and the dope in today’s leading news story than we do ourselves. Then we question why we suffer; struggle with depression; and seek out meds to balance our “blahs” with chemically-induced “bliss”.
Unless we get a handle on these three points alone, balance will continue to remain elusive. “True progress” means we need to reach backwards; embrace what is real; move closer to our roots; and familiarize ourselves with the intuitive beings that reside within every one of us. There are no quick fixes that can solve our issues. If there were, we’d already know about them. They would have come inside the manual handed to us when we arrived on earth, just sayin’.
Share your thoughts. Has balance eluded you? And if so, what have you done about it?