Your point of view is just that: Your point of view.
Remember that when you apply your world view to the real world, or when you consider your life’s problems.
You may be better off than you think.
Or you might be doing poorly and lying to yourself.
Either way, leave your cave, ask opinions, and
Sort yourself out.
They say love is stronger than fear.
But that’s not true.
Look at media and you can tell right away what is stronger:
Messages that tell you that you are in need, and all the ways things are not good enough, rather than messages of acceptance and gratitude. They feed us a diet of danger and conflict, rather than love and unity. The reason is apparent: Because we are constantly needy and sensitive to fear.
That is why we should always be wary of letting fear take us over.
We can control fear.
IF we are vigilant against it.
IF we gain the confidence to love.
Love is risky. You might get hurt when you practice the openness of love. You might get hurt when you take that path through the rose bushes.
Yes, love is the underdog. But if you decide to play the game, if you decide to face down your fears,
love will prevail.
Buckley : Freedom breeds inequality. Unless you have freedom to be unequal, you have no such thing as freedom.
Vidal : You’re going to have a revolution if you don’t give the people the things they want…They’re going to come and take it away from you.
Both men are right.
Government’s role is not only to protect the basic and necessary freedoms for individuals so they can create, collect, and trade, but to also maintain stability, ensuring disparity does not grow to a level where class warfare puts the whole system at risk.
Ensuring stability is a tricky business, as any parent knows. How much do you protect your children before you’ve made them dependent on you, living under your roof because they’ve never been allowed to taste the failures and tribulations which allow them to grow into stable adults?
“One of life’s packages: no stability without volatility.”
What else is there but time?
The most valuable commodity. Priceless, because you cannot get more.
Whatever time you’ve been granted, you choose to spend working, chasing, hating, gaming, fucking, drinking, smoking, sharing withothers, loving, being thankful.
And how can you be thankful without spending the time being thankful?
I swear that the next time I buy nail clippers, I am going to chain it to a log, something so big that I would never lose the damned thing again.
I must own three of them, and yet every time I’m left searching around trying to find them.
And then it appeared. It was laying there, right in front of me. I had been looking around so much, thinking about where they could be, that I hadn’t been paying attention to what was actually there in front of me.
There’s a lot of thinking to be done today. Because there’s a lot of information making impressions. There’s also a lot of heartfelt loyalty to camps, parties, race, and gender, and this makes paying attention hard to do, because I’ve limited my attention to thinking about the information that I care about: the information that supports my cause.
I lift up my head from the trough of media feed that’s engineered for my consumption, a tempting and tantalizing mixture of fear and drama.
Then I take a look around. And I notice Reality.
Reality doesn’t have a camp. Reality stretches out far and wide. It requires paying attention, and processing new information.
And this is more enlightening than sitting in a camp, trapped by my thoughts. Go explore and learn new things: no need to protect the camp. There’s a whole world out there to pay attention to.
Do you lean more towards empowering individuals?
Or more towards empowering the institutions?
More simply, do often find yourself in the group that wants to be left alone to build your home and community?
Or do you find yourself in the group that won’t leave others alone, and wants the institution to build your community for you?
Church authorities or government authorities: Forced communion is not as meaningful as independent communion.
Legislation is good.
Participation in your community is better.
I was envious of his car, a BMW, a beautifully made vehicle. And his big house, with all the life options it offered. And his career, working a lot, but earning a lot. He had no real troubles. He took his kids to football and dance practice. I could see he was happy. But how could I know?
Success on the outside doesn’t mean success on the inside. I had no idea what was going on inside his head. Then I found out he suffered from depression. And insecurity. Impossible, right? But, it was happening. And then I heard he got a divorce. A devastating thing to go through, splitting from your partner.
And yet….
We’ve all got it pretty good. At least, in the First World, but even in Africa. For the average person, it’s the best it’s ever been in the history of humankind. Worried about being robbed by bandits? Not so much anymore. Losing half your children in childbirth? Not really.
Lifespan, up; General health: up. Incidence of assault and robbery: down. Females CEOs: going up every year in the US. Black and brown minorities fill our judge seats, academic faculties, and medical professions. We even elected a black person as president after a history of slavery.
But that doesn’t mean injustice and wrongs don’t happen. We are human after all, with immorality and prejudging seeded in each of us. After appreciating the good life, we can still make our community a better place by helping each other, by taking responsibility for being a good neighbor.
Gratitude and love are still the most critical parts of human life. That has not changed. What has changed is your environment. It is a much safer place, and more fruitful than it has ever been.
Yes, the kings and moneyed class still control more than you. But they’re not more happy than you.
Choose your own game.
Because we don’t need the kings anymore.
Photo credit: Aubrey Marcus podcast
arabedrossian.org 