Most of us will go through life on a fairly predictable trajectory. It would take a concerted effort to live outside of the established parameters of what came before, doubly so because we learn most my modeling, training, and educating by the same means and influences.
Much of this Earthly life revolves around contrast and struggle. We’re born, and we struggle to breathe and communicate. We grow and learn to crawl, walk, run… to speak, to assert our identity and independence and discern our ambitions, goals, dreams and desires. Some of us will follow through, most will not.
We’ll carry on, bump into one another, go about some routines, maybe “earn a living” in a manner so convoluted and unfulfilling to our spirits, but as a means to sustain ourselves… until something better comes along.
Like the generations before us, we’ll complain about politics, economy, religion, education, housing and the usual predetermined “issues” thrust upon us by those who play the game better.
There are, of course, 100,000 variations of this theme.
In our society, we can put our children through ineffective public institutions, or choose to raise them off-the-grid and in the woods — far from smartphones and spine-softening amenities — and everything in between.
Cultures and faiths may clash, children may venture off and find their own way, borders will be drawn and redrawn… our bodies or our minds will fail us and another version of humanity will be noted wherever such things are recorded.
So what’s our why? Why come again into this strange place, for the 2nd, 101st, 1013th, or 10,765th time? Curiosity? Adventure? Because we can pretend to forget?
None of the current worries or concerns in the world are original. The planet has warmed and cooled many times. Technology has emerged and exploded, and has been destroyed and forgotten. Civilizations have come and gone. Recorded history has been revisionist at best.
If it’s true that not one of the collective can be enlightened unless all of the collective is, why do we keep holding ourselves down? It is evident that there is a shift toward the calm center and balance of all things. Yet, it’s also evident we’re fighting it every step of the way.
We can make up such wonderful names for the “other”: the shadow aspects; the dark side; the polarity… but there is no other. The more we incessantly define and persist about separation, the more the separation prevails.
So, we are perpetually at odds with ourselves, within and without. And maybe that’s the great plan of this time and place. Until we can find ourselves in both aspects, as both sides, this template we limit ourselves to will be the only one we can know and be.
Solvitur ambulando