Crash Course

We keep ourselves busy, distracted, and exhausted, then wonder why we feel so disconnected. Perhaps the way forward isn’t another system to manage or another task to complete, but a return to presence, community, curiosity, and the people who need us.

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All the rushing around and mindlessly bumping into things will never add up to fulfillment or purpose. Incessant doing is often just a coping mechanism for the spirit’s unrest. Rest more.

There is little you truly need to do beyond seeing through the grand delusion, knowing thyself, and singing your song.

Consider whether the days of unconscious routine and mass conformity ought to be behind us. Or are we content to keep plowing through resources, poisoning the seas, leveling forests, and building, developing, and “progress-ing” in a cycle of insanity…

Some are choosing to build off-grid communities, designing and living more independently, holistically, and organically… in concert with nature and using simpler means. These choices can benefit the broader collective. Centralized systems are often dysfunctional, inefficient, and driven by greed. We need to reconnect with our neighbors rather than surround ourselves with more concrete, cameras, locks, gates, and fences.

Children need conscious, present parents. Yet several generations of parents were themselves inadequately guided or mentored, left to fumble through as best they could, and severed from the wisdom of elders.

Predictably, kids are disappearing into abstraction, escapism, and the artificial: addictive, distracting technologies and toys that exasperated parents use to keep them occupied. Perhaps they can’t process or understand their parents’ persistent anxiety and quiet desperation. Nor are they in any hurry to embrace the normalized dysfunction and madness-inducing reality that “adults” occupy every day.

Hold your children. Laugh with them. Play more. Know that they want your happiness and don’t want to feel like a burden. There’s too much policing and monitoring. Trust them. Know them. Let them know you.

What if we chose curiosity over control and manipulation, love over force, patience over punishment, and conscience and character over fiction, gossip, and cowardice?

Use fewer words, but with greater authenticity.

Spend more time outdoors. Rest more. Be easier on yourself. Allow more silence and space for intuition and inspired action. Recognize your coping mechanisms and the unconscious routines they sustain. Even in the most mundane things, look again.

Memento vivere