Don’t be content with being good in what you do – it is limiting, and just another form of seeking validation. Be daring instead.
Category: Fresh Perspective
Humorous Permission
We seem to be most authentic when wrapping information we wish to communicate in humour. It can be a thought-out joke, or a haha or an emoji appended to an end of a pseudo-serious sentence, but ultimately there is some sort of truth or genuine feeling being communicated. Humour gives us permission to be honest and vulnerable, because it incorporates an insurance policy. If the information wrapped in a joke becomes too serious or offensive, we can always claim we were trying to be funny.
Keys to Life
There have been many times where I’ve achieved much but still felt unfulfilled. The objective was reached, but the journey of pursuing that objective stopped. After several deeper, vulnerable conversations with my heart, I’ve realized that the process of living is like life – it needs to evolve. To unlock and sustain that evolution – the life itself – living needs new gates opened. New pastures to explore, graze, grow upon, play in, and add to. Three such gate keys are:
- Insistence on continually challenging and breaking established and forming habits
- Protecting the present moment by defending it from rumination (being possessed by memories) and excessive sentimentality
- Backing up thought with action (manifesting life)
Further reflection led to the realization that the gates these three keys unlock are interconnected, like gears of some life-stopping mechanism. They each remove the living aspect of life, making it static (less alive). Through practice, I’ve discovered that you don’t have to unlock all three simultaneously to enjoy a more fulfilling life. If you unlock any one of them, the other two are less effective at confining you, making the total escape easier and self-fulfilling.
Pathos of Ownership
To own is to suffer. To own is to grasp and crave, endlessly, unceasingly. Ownership is attachment, a practice that is widespread, and oftentimes, pathologically encouraged. To obsessively accumulate until we are bogged down, physically and mentally, in the futile pursuit of security and validation. The idea of ownership is a human construct, though perhaps a more accurate word is man-made, considering modern civilization was built on an unbalanced, testosterone-directed patriarchy. On the most basic level, ownership is a form of aggression, a fruitless conquest of an insecure ego over material.
The compulsion of ownership is self-perpetuating, since you cannot truly own anything, not permanently anyways. If you cannot own a moment, an essential unit of time and space, you cannot own anything material borne out of it either. Like all moments, material things pass. Intuitively, we know this, but instead of continuing to move forward, taking as much as we need, we obsess over our future security. We start hoarding things, en masse. We start measuring and comparing each other on how much we’ve accumulated, and take pride in owning more – or shame in owning less.
Ultimately, the mechanism of ownership reaches a point where its internal relationship inverses. Our imagined security becomes so dependant on the idea of accumulation that the things we think we own now own us. They consume us and run our thoughts, actions, and ultimately, lives.
You don’t need to own something to benefit from it. Enduring societies and ecosystems are built on networks of sharing, not hoarding. Your own body exists, and thrives, because trillions of its cells are reciprocating. And when they are not, you get sick.