Is our own self.
And right now, there are endless opportunities to ignore and escape from encountering it. Maybe that’s why we’re all so lost.
Then again, spending every waking moment with the self can also be a serious problem, as we see with solitary confinement.
Regardless of which way we tilt, the self is still the core of our problems. Heal that and we can heal the world.
Daily writing can help gather the thoughts in your head, giving clarity as needed. Daily meditation, on the other hand, will keep you in control of those thoughts. Together, they’re good habits to acquire.
However, there’s another habit that acts as a precursor to both. It’s one upon which writing depends and meditation is needed, but slowly slipping away from our constant stimulated world.
That’s the habit of just getting lost in your thoughts.
Let your mind go and allow it to wander as it will, ignoring the impulse to alleviate what you may perceive to be boredom. Your mind needs to relax and be free.
Writing will give you clarity.
Meditation will give you focus.
A wandering mind, however, will give you creativity.
Our actions are less vague than our intentions.
The integrity of our existence is not just what’s in our hearts, but what we do in our concrete, physical existence. Whatever we do in our hearts must be spelled out in our deeds.
Otherwise, there’s no point in fighting for our values because we’re not living them.
The fig tree that taunts the protagonist in Sylvia Plath’s, The Bell Jar, is a widely recognized, read and analyzed passage. It’s iconic, really (ignoring the fact it’s always taken completely out of the context of the story).
However, let’s imagine us coming back to that fig tree at a point in our lives when we’ve made our choices.
Look at all the figs that have fallen to the ground.
Lives that could have been.
Pasts that can no longer be reclaimed.
We can look at all of them with regret, making futile attempts to pick them up and have a bite as they rot away. Or we can mourn them.
Start the grieving process in order to move on.
Because we’re here and there are other trees to eat from in the garden of our lives.
Learning to love is a difficult task as it requires a certain emotional maturity. This isn’t something that’s necessarily defined by age, but man, it’s something I wish I had more of when I was younger.
The idea of love was a bit of a foreign concept, especially in the way that others spoke about it.
Sure, if you pressed me enough, I would tell you that I loved my family, but I didn’t know what that really meant. Love wasn’t even my most treasured emotion—it was anger. I was an angry person for many years, holding onto it without ever knowing why.
It wasn’t until I learned to let go of that anger, that I was fully able to experience love.
Replacing hositility and bitterness with an outlook of love has changed me in numerous ways and I continue to work at it. I don’t always get it right, and it’s not easy, but it certainly helps my relationships with others .
Loving others, and doing it well, requires more than words: it requires you to live a message.
It’s a never-ending process, but worth working on.
The hardest part of any project isn’t doing the work, or even getting started, it’s doing the thinking for it. That’s where most people stall out because they either don’t want to think (and the brain hates using up its resources unnecessarily) or they overthink and aren’t sure where to begin.
I’ll even be so bold as to say the biggest challenge of being human is to engage in critical thinking.
This is why the idea of outsourcing our brains is such a powerful one. Why bother keeping anything in there, or thinking through anything, when we can get something external to think for us? In fact, it might even do a much better job.
Isn’t this the promise of the technological utopia espoused to us by technologists? Once we achieve the singularity (a merging of human and machine), we will have elevated the human being to a new evolution of existence.
Our existence will be solved.
We will all be better off.
Of course, this necessitates that somebody before us has done the proper thinking… and one that will set us on a good course…
But how is that working out for us right now?
Much of our thinking is influenced by algorithms that feed us what we want to hear, mainly guided by marketing for companies to profit. Even our education system is designed in a way that follows the current thinking of the time without any regard for conversation or argument.
And with a cacophony of information being dumped upon us, it’s impossible to spend time filtering out what matters and what we should reflect upon. Our world is moving so fast it doesn’t want us to stop and think.
Just take it for what it is and move on.
Put the question in the AI Chatbot, get an answer and feel satisfied with what it gave.
Accept this particular news source as the reliable one because the others seem nonsensical.
Quick answers. Shortcuts. Done.
Anything to avoid putting the actual effort into thinking, which works out great for the people who want to manipulate that laziness. Which is what this is: manufactured laziness.
Just as a body falls into a state of disrepair when it’s not taken care of, as does the mind. Exercise the thinking muscle with the utmost strain and we may find ourselves in a society that thinks for itself once more.
If A leads to B
and B leads to C,
where C is a regretful action,
then it’s probably best to stop doing A, rather than finding ways of recovering from C.
Prevention is always more potent than cure and it’s best to cut off the head of the snake before it devours us.