Month: December 2020

Responsibility for the bigger picture

We might, increasingly, be living our lives by way of technology’s various portals, but isn’t the real world still out there being affected by all our choices? This sense in which, distracted by the overwhelming challenges or opportunities we’re facing, we might not see all the impacts we’re having and trends we’re forming part of out in the world around us. Yet aren’t we still responsible for all that we do?

Isn’t that where we stand, as humans? Expected to understand the world, foresee consequences, and act wisely with regard to all that’s shaped by our actions. Our ideas on “life” and what’s acceptable within it “becoming” the paths we walk through reality, the choices we’re making and picture all that is painting within the situations surrounding us – our values and priorities clearly on display. (Notes One)

If freedom is to think and do as we please, isn’t that an incredible responsibility? If we’re to understand the complex realities our lives now feed into, then act intentionally and compassionately within them, the value of all we’re letting into our minds seems essential. Isn’t it important we know what we’re doing? If we’re supposed to be using our personal judgement in navigating these choppy waters.

Sometimes it seems quite incredible, the position modern humanity’s finding itself in: all we’re expected to process, filter out, integrate and work with. As if our role is to maintain the ability to form reliable conclusions within this ever-changing reality. Our minds being this threshold between all we take in and all we decide to act upon – suggestions, accepted, becoming what we create through our involvement. (Notes Two)

Of all the thoughts we have in mind, how much do we really mean to weave into reality? Which values are we choosing to act on? How thorough an understanding of humanity’s convoluted path to the present are we aware of in how we interact with one another? Do we truly know all it is to be human – the different beliefs, intentions and phases of life people are working within?

Might it not be that, caught up in the novelty and stress, we’re not stepping back to grasp what’s actually going on? Not quite noticing humanity, broken apart, unable to relate, losing grip on what those before were hoping to bring to life through all that was set in motion around us. As if, swept by the tide, we might be so overwhelmed by isolated struggles that we lose sight of where we’re going. (Notes Three)

Maybe things are now so complicated that it’s naïve to expect many to understand what we’re involved in – all the hidden connections or causalities playing out behind the scenes. “Can” we bypass our intelligence and leave things in the hands of those which such insight, though? If we’re not able to use our own minds, expected instead to defer to something we’re told, how is that sufficient?

If we’re involved in creating reality, is it not better we act deliberately within it?

Notes and References:

Note 1: Understanding & staying informed
Note 1: Values, and what’s in evidence
Note 1: Is this complicated or relatively simple?
Note 1: What we create by our presence
Note 2: How are we supposed to choose?
Note 2: The incredible responsibility of freedom
Note 2: All we concern ourselves with & encourage
Note 2: Understanding what we’re all part of
Note 3: Is there any end to the power of thought?
Note 3: Do we live in different worlds?
Note 3: Does technology oversimplify things?
Note 3: Pace of change & getting nowhere fast

Ways to share this:

Education as an understanding of life

Within everything that’s going on around us, how is it that we piece together some sense of what it all means? Between all the thoughts, ideas, agendas, illusions or misrepresentations, how are we to ensure that the picture we’ve got in mind of “reality” is something we’d be wise to hold onto and build our lives around?

The contents of our minds must be important: all we’re letting in, weeding out, or seeking ways to work around. This sense in which our heads contain all we’ve taken in, how we’ll then interpret things, and the decisions we’re making each moment of every day. Potentially, a place of error or mistaken conclusions compounded, year on year, as our ideas clash up against reality. (Notes One)

As beings that essentially “live” from the mind, the question of how we fill it seems unfathomably significant. If “all we’re taking in” becomes the paths we’re walking, what might that mean for humanity? Education’s “aim” presumably then being to prepare people by enabling them to see how things work – all the practices and values around which we need to be structuring our lives (Notes Two).

Somehow, finding ways of giving us the knowledge and capacity to be fully human and live constructively within our society and this world of which we’re all part. Some workable sense of how individuals fit within the whole, valuing themselves and all others rightly in every area of activity. That each person might be able to judge for themselves what’s best, based on their well-formed understanding of what it all means.

Doesn’t the world “need” us to understand? Not just from our own personal perspective, but also the social or economic meaning of all that we do: how each thing echoes out to become reality within all the lives surrounding ours. Beyond that, to have some grasp of the ultimate meaning of being human – whatever each person might decide that may be.

Now that convention or tradition seem to be so rapidly falling away, how is such an understanding of life to be maintained? Given how often we’re surrounded by questionable versions of reality or insistently-held opinions, how are we to see through all that to grasp where the truth of things actually lies? Between all conflicting pressures of life, might full understanding not perhaps fall by the wayside? (Notes Three)

Sometimes it just seems the demands of life could loom so large they obscure the complexities of how we got here and where we hoped to be heading – that we might rather leave the past behind and walk away from it with convenient handfuls of facts. But if history, despite the challenge of imagining all that’s gone on within it, is what lets us understand the present, can we afford to do that? (Notes Four)

If we’re to stand within modern realities and truly grasp what’s asked of us, isn’t it important that we see what it all means, why it matters and what we can do about it?

Notes and References:

Note 1: The battlegrounds of our minds
Note 1: Do we live in different worlds?
Note 1: Can our thinking match realities?
Note 2: Everything’s interconnected
Note 2: Connecting truthfully with life
Note 2: Is this complicated or relatively simple?
Note 3: Understanding what we’re all part of
Note 3: Seeing where others are coming from
Note 3: How quickly things can change
Note 4: Knowing the value of what you have
Note 4: Going along with what we see
Note 4: Detaching ourselves from the past

Ways to share this: