People are figuring it out every night. Over wine, over cocktails, over a few beers. Peace is found, with friends, with our kin. We are made this way. Outside of this environment, in the daylight, we struggle. This has been noted many times, with much worry and anxiety. Still, we can write in the warm candlelight of a bar, and all is well.
The "wise" often tell us we're struggling because we are doing it wrong. We are the enemy. But where does that leave us, besides doubting our humanity? I have been told to doubt myself for thirty years, and I have tried to oblige. Today, I see little reason to continue.
Doubt – the notion that we should refrain from doing – leads to doing nothing. We need something to guide us, something to do. Our doubt leads to our inaction; the action of others, however ill-informed, fills the void. Only a positive suggestion can lead to something.
Still, on the whole, we do in fact struggle. We commit crimes against each other. We hurt each other. We build glass ceilings. This is true. Why is that? Why is progress so difficult?
What are we doing to change? In our nights and weekends, we are in love with our harmless TV shows. We are reading our celebrity gossip and our sports dramas. We are hiking and dancing, finding a release, a distraction that we desperately need. What we do is necessary; it is the follow-through to our days.
As we acknowledge our need for release, what we need to change becomes obvious:
Our days.
How do we even begin?
2 comments:
Struggling to get everything done on a day, struggling to figure out how people work, and struggling to be the best that you can be are challenges that should be faced with energy and zest. When you inevitably are worn out resting is very important. Everyone struggles and when you interact with them you can either try to lessen their struggle or entangle them more. Why not choose to be as helpful and wonderful to others as you can be? Hopefully that energy will come back around to help you out when you are in need.
Doubting is an opportunity for change. True, if we doubt all and become inactive we have neglected to doubt even that doubt that stalls us, to doubt the inactivity, failed to see that inaction and action can both have detrimental consequences. We must doubt beliefs and actions, but not mistake the inaction and action as being any different than merely sides of the same coin.
But if we are only certain, where does that lead us but to act wholly on what we think we know, which cannot possibly hold the aswer to all.
Then our days must be spent in balance with our nights. What challenges of the day can we surmise that might bring the restful nights a solace rather than simply an anodyne. We could take up the challenge to postpone the anodyne, examine why we think we must take it, be more aware as we take it, and gain further capacitance to serve both ourselves and each other in both day and night, activity and rest.
If our days are a struggle we do not understand, if they struggle because we have doubted too little and find a false goal, then we struggle in vain. Not really, for eventually we will become aware, but it becomes a longer road.
I don't know many wise folk that say we are the enemy, or even that our minds are the enemy. If we see the enemy, that is the enemy to our peace. But only in changing our seeing, and not necessarily the enemy, will that become useful action.
If change is inevitable, and I think it is, it begs the question of whether or not doing change is any more helpful than not doing it, or if trying to do it brings us into a better change than if we had tried less.
But you did strike at it, the void. We try to fill the void because we fear it. The void has no animosity towards us that we did not impose on it. It is uncomfortable to grok the void, indeed, but our forever limited ability to understand it is the problem, not the sense or reality of the void.
As for progress, well, others have already tackled that better than I can.
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