Author: admin

Threads, becoming a united whole

It must be possible that all of life could come together into one big, discernible picture. All our activities, words and ideas emerging as a united whole, if only we could gain the clarity and perspective to see it. On some level, doesn’t that picture already exist?

While we might, inevitably, live life from our own perspective – viewing it through the lens of self, family, community, tribe or nation – it’s just as possible to see from any other perspective. Given it’s all part of one reality, filled with points where our disparate worlds touch, isn’t it strange to think our lives aren’t inextricably tied to all others? Our choices creating impacts we might not see as within our control.

How we see things seems an important question, as don’t we interpret everything in the light of it? Our pre-existing ideas often defining the labels we apply, theories we bring to bear, and conclusions we’re likely to reach. As if, in a way, we see what we already believe: the whole of life somehow conforming – perhaps, at times, distorting – to match itself with whatever we have in mind.

Almost as if “life” is some marriage of objective reality and the world of our thoughts woven around it: some blend of all we can see and all we can think. And, aren’t our ideas generally handed to us? This intellectual heritage of communities passing on their fundamental understanding of life, society, the individual’s needs and how best to meet them.

All these concepts we have to work with seem interesting, especially now they’re standing against whatever concepts those in other places have been using to discuss the same notions. This strange sense in which all our separate “worlds” now run alongside one another and merge together in a complex dialogue. All these ways people in different places or times have carved their reality into words.

Behind all our potentially conflicting ideas on life, though, it’s seeming more true than ever than those lives are closely connected; given all the ways technology has facilitated physical connections across space and virtual connections despite it. As if we’re increasingly living in that one, big picture our thoughts might struggle to match.

What is the web of our thinking? This net of ideas we cast across reality. How are we to grasp all that’s happening, and all that it means from every conceivable perspective? Is it even possible to accommodate diverging viewpoints on the same events? To somehow tolerate other interpretations while still uniting in constructive engagement over our many shared problems.

Is there room in this picture to admit the notion that many believe there’s more to life than meets the eye? That, beyond the physical, there might be broader realities into which our own are woven. In many ways, it seems impossible to say there’s not more in existence than our limited capacities are able to perceive.

As people standing within such free-wheeling complexity, how “are” we to marry our thoughts up with reality?

Notes and References:

Pieces of the puzzle
How much everything is connected
Channels of information
Somewhere between ideals & realities
Culture’s conversation as a way of life
Seeing what things mean
Ways of living in the world

Ways to share this:

Ways of living in the world

Of all that lives in this world, we seem to be the ones with choices; and, the ability to foresee or understand their consequence. We’re not just obeying some innate compulsion or wisdom, but have this power to consciously raise ourselves “above” our surroundings and decide what kinds of lives we will lead. Everything else may tick away evenly without much direction, but we really seem to have our own ideas about it all.

What are we to make of that? This obligation to both understand and choose wisely, given that our as much as nature’s future might depend on it. Doesn’t power – capacity – and the freedom to wield it naturally come with responsibility? As if, in our choice to partake in things, we bring upon ourselves the duty to comprehend all we’re then part of. As thinking beings, can we ever truly defer “thinking things through” to others?

Although, of course, as much as we’re living in nature we’re also living in society – all its patterns, ideas and expectations surrounding us from before we were born, seeping into our own assumptions or unquestioned beliefs about what it is to be human and what we have the right to do in life. That way of thinking might be all we’ve ever known, but isn’t there still a choice? Presumably we still decide what we’ll take part in.

Sometimes I wish we could unravel all the thinking we’re tangled within, to see where it came from and what initial premisses all this has been built up upon. Underneath it all, won’t there be some fundamental ideas around “life”? Thoughts around nature, around freedom, around society, around need, around meaning that became woven up into this increasingly strange world of thought that now has such a hold over us.

Given how long humanity’s thinking about “life” has been evolving, might it not be that we would challenge some of those starting points? That our thinking, now, might’ve taken different directions had we been the ones laying the foundations for the modern way of life. Yet, there seems little opportunity to unearth and rethink such things – as if this structure we’re in, with all its thinking, is the only one now available.

If we – collectively as much as individually – are the ones, through our choices, setting things in motion that will affect countless other beings, though, don’t we still need to grasp what it is that we’re doing? To surround “life” with our greater understanding and intention, given how much our interventions could prove perilous.

Don’t we need to “know” the reasons; the risks; the causality; the dependencies; the justification? To understand, in thought, the lifestyle we’re leading and all it means for the nested, interconnected environments surrounding ours. To “see” what we’re doing and how much it stands to affect anything we might conceivably consider “valuable” in this world.

As the ones with the capacity to understand, decide and act, don’t we also carry an incredible responsibility to live those lives well?

Notes and References:

Doing the right thing, we erase consequences
Appealing to human nature or the human spirit
The optimism in nature
Thought, knowledge & coherent vision
Nature, wisdom & leadership
Wisdom the world no longer gives?
Appreciating other ways of being

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Owning things & the problems that brings

What does it really mean for the world that we’re so interested in owning things? This idea that, of all that exists, some we might claim as “ours” then enjoy, trade or wield on that basis. We’re surely the only being on the planet that’s attached to itself this concept of having rights like it: binding ourselves to objects and all the power which that creates.

How would life be different if we weren’t operating that way? If things couldn’t be owned so much as used and then returned. If nothing we touched were permanently ours, but a shared asset which we carried responsibility for while it was in our care. Because, doesn’t owning things fundamentally shift the balance? Creating this heavy pull in a certain direction; a hold people naturally won’t want to relinquish.

Sometimes it just seems that the ideas we have in mind might be creating a lot of problems. Don’t they really establish the parameters of the game? And, like any set of rules, setting them out in clear terms seems to have the effect of creating something many then try to work around or turn to their advantage. That, as thinking beings, we’re naturally inclined to seek the most for ourselves out of any given situation.

Almost as if, with this concept of ownership, we created a world where thinking mainly of yourself can really pay off in terms of the power, status and freedom accrued. As if our ideas created this world that we now have to live with – a place of accumulating wealth, inequality and vested interests. Because anyone owning anything naturally means others do not and must negotiate for access to it.

That said, it’s clearly the foundation stone of Western thought and a legacy we perhaps quite innocently receive from the past – all that was placed in our hands. If this thinking that informed the past were somehow unworkable, perhaps we’ve little choice but to address that now, from within, while hoping we’ve since found ideas better able to match all humanity’s diversity and our place within broader realities.

Quite aside from the systemic, though, isn’t ownership problematic in other ways? All this desire to possess things, make them ours, then defend them against others. All that psychological security we seem to seek in belongings and the admiration they can bring. All the ways our energies in life are so often directed toward getting more and what that’ll then “mean” about who we are as people – our identity, status or worth.

Isn’t any kind of ownership immediately creating division? Highlighting difference or lack as a means of defining the self. Attaching value to our possessions and all they’re said to “say” about us. This sense in which our ideas of life’s worth are somehow tied up with individual relationships to physical items. The fundamental power structure of how humans once carved up and assigned the planet’s finite resources.

Might it not be that other ideas could serve us all much better?

Notes and References:

The value we’re giving to things
Markets, and what they might mean
How much is in the hands of the market
Solving all the problems we’re creating
Do markets create strange social forces?
Value and meaning in our lives
Is there any end to the power of thought?

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How much everything is connected

It doesn’t always seem so true as it is today that everything’s connected: each event or person only a few steps away from establishing some form of relationship with almost anything else on the planet. All our choices effectively playing into this increasingly fast-moving web of global interrelatedness as our ideas, products, habits, intentions or emotions spill over to impact others in ways we might never imagine.

While, before, people and their activities were mainly interwoven with their more immediate surroundings – local community and the wider society into which that played its part – things are now so irrevocably broader in scope. Almost everything seems to rely on the cooperation of so many distant services, supply chains and individuals. This global community cutting across national boundaries in search of efficiencies.

Given how quickly we seem to adapt to any form of change, it’s hard to imagine us happily going back to the kinds of restrictions on choice or convenience that earlier model effectively offered. In the last half-century, so many relative luxuries have crept into our lives – fashions, trends and belongings in no way designed to last – that the idea of limited choice or maintaining what we’ve got is beginning to seem an alien concept.

Yet, in terms of awareness, our focus is also more expansive: all those international and systemic concerns as much on our radar as the deeply personal ways individuals are being affected by it all. This whole way of life, facilitated by technology, also being laid bare before us by the same means. As if technology is a double-edged sword, creating as many obvious benefits as it does invisible challenges.

Isn’t it that all our ways are being mapped out in this tangible form to be scrutinised? That, while we might hope to deny the ramifications, it’s all there to be seen: the inequalities; attempts at justification; and increasing difficulty of claiming we didn’t know what we were doing. This sense in which all the convenience or temptation technology offers is offset by us having to then live with the knowledge of what it all means.

Almost like technology is some fundamental test of our understanding – and, willingness to expand it. That, along with the valuable benefits this created for those earlier communities, we’re now simultaneously having to grasp the significance of all the change we’re bringing about across the planet. As if we’ve been asked to extend our minds to truly care for environments, people or situations far beyond our immediate awareness.

How are we to navigate that reality and grasp what all our choices truly “mean”? How can we cope with all that was hidden or unspoken being brought to the surface, where it can no longer be denied? All these ways in which our individual or local connections have been woven into this new global context with all its undeniable complexity and all of its consequences.

With all our connections dialled up and laid bare, what sense are we to make of it all?

Notes and References:

Connecting truthfully with life
How much do intentions matter?
Power and potential
Seeing where others are coming from
Does technology oversimplify things?
Nothing short of everything
Gaining clarity on the choices before us
Responsibility for the bigger picture
Pieces of the puzzle

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Looks, human life & all its worth

Why is that we see appearances as “meaning” something about the value of what’s inside? As if the surface speaks the truth and we’re somehow right to judge worth on that basis; that we don’t perhaps stand to be sorely mistaken by doing so. Aren’t appearances notoriously misleading? So easy to fake, one way or another, and create impressions that, while they may serve us, aren’t necessarily meaningful in any real way.

That said, it’s perhaps only natural we judge by appearances, as how else can we? It’s so much easier to look to the surface and form opinions on those terms than to spend time patiently exploring and evaluating the interior life of any given entity. Perhaps we “need” some code for how to be and how choices will be viewed in order to live alongside one another. Maybe that’s simply a large part of all culture “is”.

We certainly seem encouraged to approach things that way, with all this focus on branding and so forth. As if this whole quite necessary process has become strangely deconstructed and knowingly played out in modern life. Often, it’s simply portrayed as “how things are”: the way the world works; the game we must play; the options we have. This vast spectrum of choices that represent who we will be.

Isn’t it likely to leave most people feeling bad about themselves, though? Especially given how the attributes of youth seem those most often held up as the standards for admiration. Leaving almost everyone to chase the impossible dream of never getting older – cursing the passing time for diminishing our worth in the eyes of the world.

Even before the notion of age comes into the picture, though, it seems few will ever naturally meet the strange and ever-changing standards we’re set. As if we’re all destined to never quite measure up – and, if we do, that it’ll only be a matter of time before that thing becomes dated. This sense in which we’re all perhaps chasing our tails trying to gain the ongoing approval of this type of society.

The idea that almost everyone might be living their lives feeling undervalued or misjudged by their community seems strange. All fretting over the exterior and worrying about how others see us. “Our worth” being this shaky asset as we pedal after unattainable targets in a bid to keep our heads above water.

How often does how we feel on the inside truly match how others are seeing us? Our appearance being a genuine reflection of our interior life in all its complexity, richness and worth. This state of complete comfort as we feel the judgements of others correspond perfectly with who we’re trying to be, all that matters to us and how we wish to be understood. Maybe it’s an impossible task? For our image to match our selves.

Why then do we judge, casting everyone in the light of simplified assumptions? What are we really saying by living our lives that way?

Notes and References:

Seeing what things mean
Can each be true to themselves?
Rich complexity of human being
Valuing people more
Treading carefully in the lives of others
Beauty is truth, truth beauty
These ideas we have of one another
Who gets to define us
Thought, knowledge & coherent vision

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What we have to fall back on

If the grounding created in youth is something we have to fall back on in later life, what kinds of foundations are we laying? This idea that, at various points over our lifetime, we won’t have chance to “think” and what’s normally beneath our active awareness will be what rises to the surface. As if, underneath our more deliberate actions, there lies all this subconscious training or instinctive muscle-memory.

Like falling, when you’ve no time to plan a reaction and all that’s available is whatever your body knows to do without thinking. All this basic functionality or wisdom that was probably last used, needed or relied upon in childhood – that time we actively explored reality and developed all these abilities we’ve been using since then without ever really having to think about them.

Almost as if youth’s the time for laying down these habitual grooves which can then tether us into healthy patterns over the years. All those fundamental lessons that get etched deep in our understanding as the way to be: how to move, how to act, how to relate to the physical and social world surrounding us. This base level of familiarity and capability that then underpins all we might later pile on top of it.

Which patterns are we learning, though? What’s actually going into this physical, psychological or social foundation that, presumably, forms part of our general well-being and confidence in life? How much of what we experience is forging a steady basis for existence, rather than a lurching or erratic test of our balance? These, of course, are open questions, as who’s to really say what’s finding its way within our subconscious.

It just seems interesting to consider how much is tucked away there; either imparting its strength or draining our own. And, how many useful capacities might actually be waiting there for us later, when we need them. It’s fascinating to imagine how much youth – and, education – helps prepare us in ways we might never realise; that perennial wisdom might be laid down there for us to pick up down the line.

Sometimes, though, it seems youth’s increasingly a place filled with programs and agendas. And how will all those threads combine within the overarching picture of what’s being created? This sense in which we’re essentially weaving together some immensely valuable backdrop for each individual and each society into which our lives will form a part. Perhaps, though, it’s impossible to say what will come of all this.

Hopefully we’re offered things to help us deal creatively and practically with “life” – solid foundations with an overall sense of wisdom that lets us see reality with flexible enough ideas to match its unpredictable complexity. Emerging with a realistic sense of ourselves, our capabilities and the nature of this world around us. Not swamped by fear but ready to engage constructively with the many challenges ahead of us.

This idea of how we might best go about preparing humans for life seems so far-reaching to contemplate.

Notes and References:

Learning all we need to know
Everything’s interconnected
What are we primed for?
Knowledge, capacity & understanding
Passing on what’s important

Ways to share this:

Any choice but to take a stand?

Given all the problems within society – all the many things people are rightly concerned about and convinced that others should take equally seriously – how are we to approach those cracks in our collective pavement? This sense in which the entire foundation of our increasingly global way of life seems broken up by all these inherited inequalities, injustices and strange assumptions we’re asked to live with.

In many ways, it seems we’re all simply born into a flawed situation; some stepping into positions of advantage while others are met with the opposite. As if society’s thinking carved up every aspect of our lives with dividing lines we seem to have little choice but to accept. That this is just “how things are” – the realities the past handed to us, individually and collectively.

Is that how life is? An uneven playing field of events set in motion before our arrival. A place where humanity’s finest ideals – from many perspectives – find remarkably little traction in everyday realities. Somewhere we might whitewash things with narratives that somehow sweep complex situations into convenient arcs to serve our own agendas, identities or egos.

Within it all, can we all just think what we please? Seeing life through the lens of our own priorities or concerns and denying those problems it suits us to leave unresolved. As if we might bend realities to meet our distortions, creating versions of events where others’ concerns simply don’t loom as large as they might imagine.

Don’t we tend to see things our own way? Life’s building blocks, for us, being arranged in the configuration we’re used to, we might imagine that’s what life “is” for everyone. It’s perhaps natural we’d accept the face reality turned towards us as “normal” based on our own experience, understanding and complex sense of what things mean and how we should act. After all, we can arguably only “know” life through our own eyes.

But, given we live within potentially quite imperfect sets of systems, ideas and their consequences, can we really deny those realities? Each of us retreating to the relative security of our own narrative; spinning events into arcs that leave us quite innocent. Don’t we have some kind of logical obligation to understand the networks our lives are woven into? To see what’s being created from all sides?

If the objective reality our lives form part of is broken up by many, many places where flawed thinking is creating situations people are crying out over in frustration, pain or concern for the future, don’t we “have” to listen? To hear the realities our ideas are setting in motion, see the faces of those affected and feel whatever pain has been created.

We might’ve been born into situations beyond our control, but, once in them, don’t we need to understand what’s happening and care about all the details? To admit reality – let it into our awareness – and work to resolve things so “how life is” can match honestly with our ideals about it.

Notes and References:

If environment shapes us…
Pieces of the puzzle
What’s at the heart of society?
Somewhere between ideals & realities
Learning all we need to know
Living through the changes
Conversations we agree to have

Ways to share this:

Can each be true to themselves?

In terms of individualism, can we each just be true to ourselves? Regardless of convention, expectation or the opinions of others, simply be “authentic” with regards to our own experiences, thoughts, wounds, interests and inclinations. As if the world weren’t there to limit us in any way and we could just unravel all that’s within us honestly and insistently onto our surroundings. Is that what life is? Our honest unravelling.

Maybe it is. Maybe life is “always” the unravelling of all the individuals living within it: each person working through their own grasp of life; their own capacities or limitations; their own priorities, desires and concerns; their own attempts to find meaning, belonging or recognition within the complex interwoven fabric of all of our lives. Maybe we can’t help but be true to ourselves, given it’s the only thing we really have.

Yet it seems, in the past, that convention hemmed people in a little tighter by asking that “the self” bend to meet the firm expectations of their community. This idea that, in the balance of things, individuals “should” somehow hide or distort aspects of themselves in order for society to run smoothly. Truths, realities or struggles perhaps repressed for the sake of appearances or expediency. As if what’s hidden just disappears.

Almost as if “life” were covered over with some quaint veneer of politeness under which all the problems and frustrations simply grew toward the point we’re now finding ourselves. This picture of compounded, ignored or denied issues within society having been left to develop as they will – out of sight, left to their own devices as generation upon generation lived through the consequences.

It seems perhaps natural that such a situation would erupt and shift to its opposite: for all that’s within us to seek the light of recognition, acknowledgement, healing and release. That we would eventually realise that things must be addressed as they don’t simply “disappear” but inevitably remain within the lives and souls of all they affect. That perhaps all we’d been doing was sweeping our problems under the carpet.

What happens, though, when everyone’s pushing everything out into the open? If everyone’s vehemently insisting on their own concerns, perspectives, interpretations, priorities and interests. As if each individual wants to become “the way to be”, the archetypal human on which our collective understanding should be based. How are we to broker some new balance between us all in that realm?

Sometimes it seems individualism is like this tipping point where we’re pushing toward “self” at the expense of the shared spaces surrounding us all – a lever between self and community along which the balance of power has shifted quite dramatically.

Given we all live within one reality – interwoven by the countless moments each day where our choices and words unavoidably converge – and need, somehow, to share our thoughts around how to resolve all the many things happening within it, how’s that conversation to work if we’re all insisting on our own version of reality?

Notes and References:

Authenticity & writing our own story
“The Spirit of Community”
People, rules & social cohesion
Can we manage all-inclusive honesty?
Conversation as revelation
The power of convention
Do we live in different worlds?
All that we carry around with us
Integrity and integration

Ways to share this:

Channels of information

How are we supposed to find our feet within “the conversation” of society? This huge realm of ideas, events, facts, experiences, assumptions, theories and foredrawn conclusions we’re all essentially born into. Almost as if humanity, at some distant point, cloaked our realities in thought and now only lets us address things on those terms. As if we’re all part of a discussion that can’t be challenged.

Isn’t almost everything we hear already part of a chain of thought? All the lines drawn; sides taken; positions entrenched. Everything tending to have some agenda, premise or outcome we’re pushed to accept. As if it’s all part of this mental carving up of space where any given voice stands “somewhere” within the convoluted logic we inherited from the past.

Is that all we can do? Pick up threads, relate them to current phenomena, and take old arguments to new places. Those fundamental worldviews effectively becoming the frames through which life is now seen, interpreted, dissected and discussed. Established positions and disagreements getting layer upon layer of new history as we reanimate all the conflicting ideas we received.

It must shape how we see life: the ways we’re told to look at things and debates we’re encouraged to take our places in. This volatile world of preconceived notions we’re swept up in then left to ride these waves of emotion, reaction or despair. Our awareness and our concerns perhaps defined by whoever had our ear, piqued our interest or sparked our indignation.

Who “should” we listen to? Which interpretation of reality “should” we align ourselves with? Whatever resonates strongest or best serves our own personal interests? Whichever perspective scares or comforts us most? If the voices we heed become the lens through which we’re seeing situations, acting within them and responding to others, the positions we take must strongly influence the directions in which we’re headed.

If those voices are largely dictated by pre-existing groups within society – those with vested interests in perpetuating certain patterns – what does that mean for the lives we all lead? As if we’re really just drawn up into this strange configuration of reality playing itself out from the debates of the past and the situations into which they placed us. Present realities and ideas being this thought structure we all stepped into.

Digging beneath the second or third iteration of those original theories, can we still find the truth of the matter? Observations and concepts that can still speak to the realities of our lives and nature of the systems those lives perhaps naturally need to be woven into. Rather than having these polarised exchanges from out at the perimeters of modern thought, is it possible to reach back for what we’re really talking about?

Sometimes it just seems, while trying to navigate a landscape filled with hidden dangers, we’re stuck in strangely powerless arguments from countless extreme positions. As if our feet or our words are pedalling in the air, divorced from the realities we’re striving to address.

Notes and References:

Conversations we agree to have
Learning all we need to know
Do we need to understand the past?
Caught in these thoughts
Bringing things into awareness
On whose terms?
Can our thinking match realities?
What’s the right mindset for news?
If environment shapes us…

Ways to share this:

All we project around gender

Of all the topics that seem to be becoming increasingly difficult to discuss, for some reason gender appears near the top of the list. Maybe it’s simply as fundamental as anything else? This deeply personal, significant difference between people, their perspectives, and the expectations placed on them. A simple yet complex way of dividing things up and pointing out all the many and various qualities that make us human.

In a way it seems fascinating how much humanity is divided: that this simple philosophical concept of “human” can be broken up into so many beautiful and unique variations. That “what divides us” often overwhelms “what unites us”. Aren’t we part of the same picture? All the many ways human “being” can flow into and through all we find around us. This endless diversity of human existence through time and space.

Yet, around it all, we seem to have such fixed notions of how things should be – all these expectations, labels and criticisms we so freely apply to others; all the strangely insistent ideals we’re faced with in cultural life; all those persistent assumptions that seem so deeply woven into social and personal relationships. All these “ideas” about what it is to be feminine or masculine.

Isn’t it strange? That we’d imagine all the complexity of either side could be reduced to a simple set of expressions. This idea that groups should all be, look, think, act or relate a certain way – and, that anyone who doesn’t is somehow mistaken or flawed. There may be functional or cultural conventions dictating how people should “be” and what kinds of choices are admirable or acceptable, but how meaningful is it all really?

Sometimes, as with many things, it seems so superficial: all the ways body, clothes or appearance are seen as saying something about any given individual. This whole conversation of “types” that projects so many expectations and judgements upon us all. It’s a weird game. Especially when every choice we’re making is being packaged as some branded sense of “who we are” – a real commitment or statement of identity.

If the labels weren’t so rigid and heavy – all the mannerisms, colour preferences, anticipated interests – could this whole thing not flow a little easier? If, beneath notions of male or female, we had a clearer space for simply being human. Might it not be that we’re all far more complex internally than the forms currently being offered to us by society or culture?

Almost this sense that the boxes we’re offered – the images, assumptions and ideals cast upon us – may be too constrictive, leaving little room for all the nuance of individual self-determination. That we’re effectively making a complex set of realities far too simple and prescriptive. Also, that we’re perhaps far too inclined to define one another based on appearances, while lacking the opportunity it takes to truly understand.

Between the inner and the outer of it all, where’s the balance that might let each person freely be who they truly are?

Notes and References:

These ideas we have of one another
Visual language and spaces
Understanding what we’re all part of
Valuing people more
The beauty in home economics
“Women who run with the wolves”
Value and meaning in our lives
Living through the changes
Ways of being & what’s getting left out
Deepening understanding

Ways to share this: