Category: Media

Is there a way we could stand within reality in full respect of all that’s a part of it? Each thing being allowed its space, its right to be what it is and live whatever life it needs to be living. As if everything could somehow coexist without this need to divide it up with competing interests. Or do we simply “have” to make certain priorities more important in order to justify pushing ahead at the cost of other concerns?

Maybe it’s just that “everything” has the desire to grow? To flourish, develop, expand and be recognised for the value it brings. Each living thing tending to want to thrive or survive by getting what it needs. Life, then, becoming carved apart by the battlelines of different beings sharing the same space, seeking the same limited resources or opportunities.

This sense in which we’re forever seeing one another as different – as competitors we must somehow push back so we’re free to take whatever it is we want. Isn’t it a strange mindset? Given we could’ve decided to see others as allies or respect them as individuals with just as much right to see life their way and make their own choices. Sometimes it just seems the ideas we apply to life might be causing a lot of problems.

Although maybe it’s only natural we see things from our own perspective? That we would see life through our own ideas, passing judgements in light of them as they lead us toward their often-inevitable conclusions. How are we ever to gain a perspective that lets “our” ideas sit by “theirs” without seeking for one version to be proved right? As if the versions of reality we each have in mind might be mutually exclusive.

Given our interests compete, maybe it’s natural that our ideas will? That we’ll seek to justify whatever path it is that benefits “us” by assuring a safer, more profitable future. This inclination – from the personal all the way to the global – toward seeing any advantage to one as a detriment to another. As if life’s destined to be this picture of everyone jostling for position.

Isn’t it fundamentally a picture of conflict? This desire for more, and for others to have less, in a constant battle over how we will move forward as a body of humanity. Seeing life that way, won’t we seek to discredit others or convince ourselves their experiences matter less than ours? As if we can’t admit to them being equal and deserving just as much respect as whichever group it is we’ve identified ourselves with.

What I think I’m trying to say is, is this the only way to approach things? Deciding that one perspective has to win and naturally believing it must be ours, for the sake of our own survival. It just seems so strangely aggressive and unaccommodating, so dismissive and uncooperative. Do we really need all these dividing lines, or could life work differently if we started approaching it differently?

Notes and References:

Threads, becoming a united whole
Pieces of the puzzle
Holding back, for the sake of others
How much everything is connected
Channels of information
Does money crowd out other values?
Economy as a battleground
Somewhere between ideals & realities
Living through the changes
Conversations we agree to have

With everything that’s going on in life – all we’re involved with or asked to become aware of – where are we to turn for a reasonable and honest yet empowering sense of where we stand and what we can do? While there are clearly many, many voices out there hoping we’d lean on them as our trusted source of information, who exactly “are” those voices and where might their advice be leading?

Asking that, the inference must be that people have an agenda – a position, interpretation or perspective they’re hoping we’ll take up as our own defining worldview. As if everyone’s already moved a few steps away from raw, unvarnished “reality” to offer, instead, their view of it and conclusions over the paths we should walk within this vast landscape of options.

Maybe we’re simply supposed to choose? Select from the offerings of media, industry, individuals or tribes those we’ll let inform the ideas we have in mind and steps we’re likely to take. As if this world’s now carved up by these theories spun around it: the basic camps and various sub-groups we each found our way into and may struggle to leave.

What’s behind it all? These bodies of thought that spread their tendrils through our intellectual space suggesting how we might view things and the overarching picture into which we should be slotting our facts. What kind of reality are people hoping to usher in instead of this one? Which principles, starting points or values form the foundation for their thinking?

Viewing these voices as akin to beacons guiding our path or lighting our way, what are we allowing power over us? Telling us what we’re seeing and how we should see it seem incredibly powerful functions within groups of humans endowed with the capacity for thought. Aren’t our minds, our ideas, the frame through which we view and respond to life? The vehicle for our freedom, perhaps.

And, in that bigger picture, how many are concerned more for our personal experiences than for the collective realities we’re effectively helping create? It seems incredible how much life’s been deconstructed into these basic, individual building blocks many are vying to influence in order to bring their visions to life – the overwhelming, stressful complexity of it all.

Given so much seems commercially driven – and, that the complicated nuance of truth may not sell as well as audacious, fear-inducing lies – might it be that our understanding of reality isn’t what we might hope? Within it all, how often are voices genuinely motivated by humanity’s wellbeing rather than having something to gain or to sell?

Behind whatever masks any given voice might be wearing, how are we to discern where to place our trust? Somehow holding back in the face of this insistent confusion and finding strength to judge for ourselves what’s going on here. Because, if reality’s overly carved up, could we not position ourselves to heal those divisions with a more expansive worldview instead of exacerbating whatever problems we inherited?

Notes and References:

Channels of information
Understanding & staying informed
Reading between the lines
Which voice can we trust?
Who should we trust?
Having confidence in complex systems
Being conscious of our constructions

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…

Given how many words have and are being spoken each day, particularly in recent years, how much of all we’re now adding can be considered original? Isn’t it conceivable that almost everything’s already been said? All possible combinations of thought, perspective and opinion already having been spoken out there into the world by someone, somewhere, at some point.

Almost as if there’s nothing new: that it’s all been thought, done or discovered and we’ve nowhere further to go in our thoughts about reality. That, somewhere in the dark recesses, someone’s always going to have spun a theory or articulated the details of whatever it is we might be struggling with. That someone’s always able to say, “Of course, we’ve been talking about this, weren’t you listening?”

How are we to broach conversations where so many experts or interested parties have been delving deep to chart every particular corner of reality? Aren’t we always going to be cast back as ignorant or uninformed whenever we attempt to expand our understanding? Inevitably wandering into areas where others are already specialists; having taken whatever conversation’s to be had into specific, convoluted places.

Thinking of reality as a landscape surrounded by our thoughts about it, though, isn’t there always going to be a process of sharing those ideas with others? Each person’s perspectives and opinions inevitably sitting within the whole; their unique viewpoint speaking of what it’s like to be the human living that particular life. We might each be touched by different aspects of reality, but doesn’t it all relate?

Rather than thinking we’ve nothing to add – that we’re all simply treading old paths without anything new to contribute – maybe the expansion of our awareness into seemingly unrelated areas is the challenge we face? That, instead of defending our own area of expertise, we need to somehow welcome others into them and find ways to mutually share and appreciate one another’s concerns.

As if the knowledge is there, the landscape already mapped by advance guards of concerned or interested people, yet we still have to find ways of tying it all together. Each of us somehow needing to inch our way towards understanding what everyone else is passionate about – how life is from countless perspectives and all the issues we rightly need to concern ourselves with and help to resolve.

Within that place, how are we to address one another? If the goal’s essentially awareness and change, isn’t it important we communicate in ways that are likely to sustainably achieve those ends? Not alienating our audience or causing ourselves to burn out in the fiery flames of indignant frustration. How else are we to get up to speed with all these specific ideas of progress, plus the history of their development?

Sometimes it just seems that, despite our fine intentions, we might often be pulling at the seams of mutual comprehension; that the meaningful communication needed to address our many problems is buried under so much that it stifles our ability to listen.

Notes and References:

What is the public conversation?
Anger, and where we direct it
Can our thinking match realities?
Is there any end to the power of thought?
Will things change if we don’t make them?
What should be leading us?
Words & relating as paths to change

Trying to figure out where we stand as modern humanity has always been a large part of what this writing project’s about – digging down into the ideas behind how we live and where they seem likely to lead. Because, in a way, isn’t that what modern life asks of us? Everything laid bare, voiced from every angle, as part of this new conversation trying to get to the bottom of all that’s going on.

One of the many insightful challenges we’re facing must be how there’s nowhere to hide? Our lives being run through technology, every inclination finding some seemingly secret avenue for expression and exploration, sometimes seems like a strangely convoluted way of getting everything out in the open. Isn’t it all there? All the interests and consequences discernible, if we care to look. (Notes One)

Almost as if everything we’ve seen as acceptable has been captured by this new way of operating – a strange snapshot of where humanity had got to by all those moments in time. Situations that’ve since been dialled up in all these self-referential ways to become the complex systems our lives are now so closely woven into. As if society were engulfed by the limitations in its own way of thinking. (Notes Two)

Aren’t we surrounded by the outworkings of potentially quite mistaken ideas? Things that once made sense or sat harmoniously within their natural and social environment now becoming unwieldly as they’re conducted on the global scale. Things like diet; waste; greed; intolerance. All the things societies have “always” struggled with having been transposed into this new interweaving community.

Within it all, what are we to make of modern life’s insistent level of awareness? Of all that’s being brought to our attention, quite legitimately seeking our understanding and engagement, as “all that’s wrong in the world” is constantly exposed for the suffering it’s causing. Our roles in facilitating, tolerating or benefitting from situations being diligently pointed out in the hope we’ll realise what we’re taking part in (Notes Three).

Isn’t it that we’re always a link in the chain? Each person standing “under” the ramifications of the past and “under” the future we’re involved in creating by way of our every decision. As if each moment is an opportunity to either resolve problems or perpetuate them – our awareness, perhaps, being the resistance that prevents us from understanding how much our earlier ideas might’ve been mistaken. (Notes Four)

How’s that conversation to go? If patterns we inherited were reasonable on the scale they once happened, how are we to navigate them being dialled up to unmanageable levels – any imperfection now magnified onto the global scale? Almost as if every way of life is being asked to change, as it cannot be expanded to accommodate everyone. As if we’re all needing to negotiate new ways of being.

Finding deep understanding of our own way of life – all it means, why it matters, what’s truly essential – while allowing others the same freedom sometimes seems incredibly complicated.

Notes and References:

Note 1: The picture data paints of us
Note 1: Times of revelation
Note 1: Responsibility for the bigger picture
Note 2: Systems, their power, whose hands?
Note 2: Where’s the reset button & can we press it?
Note 3: Understanding what we’re all part of
Note 3: Does technology oversimplify things?
Note 3: Education as an understanding of life
Note 3: Can our thinking match realities?
Note 3: All we’re expected to understand
Note 4: Will things change if we don’t make them?
Note 4: Detaching ourselves from the past
Note 4: How fast can it all unravel?
Note 4: Desire to retreat, need to engage

From all the separate pockets of fact, insight and expertise, is it still possible for us to draw together a truthful and meaningful understanding of all life is? Can the intense knowledge of each field pool into one balanced sense of “reality”? And, if it can, are the paths we should take in any given direction going to be clear? Can we be sure of all the consequences any one choice or policy might set in motion?

If the task before us “is” to understand all we’re engaged in and act wisely in the light of that knowledge, the challenge we face seems far from easy. Doesn’t modern life engulf us with immediate insight into the affairs of the whole world? Everything insistently placed before us, demanding attention, asking we accept its premise or its suggestions.

This constantly shifting tide of information where every story’s told from every perspective, inviting various conclusions. As if every possible shade of thought or opinion is all being shared at once – reality taking on every conceivable idea we might have about it. All those threads being woven into subtly or dramatically different narratives, suggesting causality or intention that may or may not be there. (Notes One)

How are we to keep up with it all? Weeding out all that’s erroneous, ill-intended or simply distracting to piece together a clear sense of what’s going on, why it matters and how to respond. Is our capacity to assimilate limitless, or will information overload inevitably lead to simplification, generalisation and stress?

Even if we manage to absorb enough of all that’s surrounding us, can we then reach the position of certainty needed to judge? Standing, somehow, on the back of experience, information and education to discern fact from fiction, filter out the unnecessary, and confidently form decisions able to withstand scrutiny. It seems what’s needed, as consumers and citizens: clarity and conviction. (Notes Two)

Often it just doesn’t seem feasible. That complex realities are rarely spoken in simple terms, while so much else is stepping in to deflect our attention and clutter our minds. That all the voices talking at once might drown out any truth they contain; desensitising us to hearing or caring about much of what’s assailing us each day. Within it all, might our grasp of reality not start to crumble? (Notes Three)

Is it still possible to understand enough, prioritise between competing values, detect the agendas at play, cut through undue influence, defuse any preconceptions, and somehow formulate informed, rational, compassionate, constructive responses? The volume of information we’re asked to process – and, the emotion often accompanying it – can easily seem overwhelming to the point of being impossible.

What are we to make of convoluted, opaque realities? All these separate activities interacting, behind the scenes, within increasingly global systems as our histories, beliefs and hopes pool into this one world that’s affecting us all. How can we manage to stand alone, confident in our understanding of all that we’re choosing to take part in?

Notes and References:

Note 1: Information might be there, but can we find it?
Note 1: Reading between the lines
Note 1: Learning from the past, looking to the future
Note 1: Going along with what we see
Note 2: How are we supposed to choose?
Note 2: Understanding & staying informed
Note 2: What’s the right mindset for news?
Note 2: Tuning out the static
Note 3: The battlegrounds of our minds
Note 3: Desensitised to all we’re told?
Note 3: Does technology oversimplify things?
Note 3: “Brave New World Revisited”

Engaging with something, aren’t we almost casting our vote for the value of its presence in our lives? Our attention on any given thing being, perhaps, an act of validation or approval that’s giving each thing greater power (Notes One). In a similar way to how we show interest in others or choose to ignore them: that, with our minds, we might decide which things we want to reflect, acknowledge or understand.

Isn’t human attention a powerful thing? That we would allow certain things – be they words, opinions, inferences, images, conclusions – into the sacred space of our minds, where they’re free to interact as they see fit with whatever else happens to reside there. Once accepted, isn’t it hard to fully erase something? It’s trekked its path through your thoughts, breaking or challenging other ideas in ways we mightn’t notice.

How are we to know the impact of all we’re letting in within modern life? It’s seems we’re fairly constantly assailed with many quite questionable sources of input (Notes Two). Compared to even the most recent past, isn’t it incredible how much information we’re now receiving? Also, how unregulated it all is in terms of production, distribution and consumption – that we’re essentially all free to do as we please, unobserved.

Yet, within it all, aren’t there still many important things at stake? Perhaps the potential repercussions of “all this” are vaster than they’ve ever been; given how quickly ideas can now travel between us and evolve to fantastic proportions. Without the checks and balances of a community’s oversight, concern and expectations, are there many limits to where individuals could go under the power of their minds?

Sometimes it seems we’ve been given quite an incredible amount of freedom: that we’re free to choose exactly how we’ll see the world and all those within it, freely self-selecting which voices we’ll listen to and attitudes we’ll adopt. Everyone free to do as they please, who’s to say where we’ll all wander off to and how easily we’ll be able to relate to one another once we get there?

Theoretically, it seems people in the past generally followed the affairs of their environment quite closely: concerning themselves mainly with events that fairly directly impacted their lives. Things they understood and had power to influence. Focussing on what surrounds you – what you hope to create there – seems such a beautiful notion of grassroots engagement, much as it’s also a recipe for meddling (Notes Three).

Looking at life as this fast-moving global reality of interlocking ideas, activities and repercussions, how are we best to use the power of our attention? If “how we spend our time” and “the things we let into our minds” have powerful consequences in terms of either distraction or of the subtle shifting of underlying values, assumptions or beliefs, isn’t it important we think about all we’re casting our vote for? (Notes Four)

If, as humans, where we place our focus is how we have an effect, where’s all this leading?

Notes and References:

Note 1: Attention as a resource
Note 1: Where do we get our ideas from?
Note 1: Do we know what we’re doing?
Note 1: Frameworks of how we relate
Note 2: Meaning in a world of novelty
Note 2: Do the “lies” blind us to truth?
Note 2: Passing on what’s important
Note 2: Is this the ultimate test?
Note 3: Inspiring people and ideas
Note 3: All that we add to neutrality
Note 3: The idea of think globally, act locally
Note 3: What does community mean?
Note 4: Powerful responsibility of a media voice
Note 4: Effect, if everything’s a drama
Note 4: Understanding & staying informed

How much in life depends on our ability to understand what’s really going on? Sometimes it seems that, in a way, the sense we make of the world around us and decisions we make in light of that knowledge is “effectively” where the realities of life are being upheld. Almost as if the ideas we have in our heads – these reflections of the world outside – are what we’re acting on and bringing to life through our choices (Notes One).

Isn’t it fundamental to the tasks of education and the media that we come to a reasonably full understanding of “life”? Building up a picture that’s as much made up of “where we came from” as it is “where we hope to be heading” and “how well we’re doing on our path to getting there”. This sense in which, if we’re not grasping all those elements rightly, we’re not perhaps in the position to correct our course.

Maybe that’s the reason “being informed” is held up as one of the essential tasks of responsible citizens? Not just to bolster newspaper sales or give us all something to talk about or argue over, but that we need to be engaged – with our hearts and minds as much as our active participation – in ensuring everything’s going in the best directions (Notes Two).

As if, as the humans making it up, society needs us to walk alongside it with the full capacity of our being: following things with our heads; feeling empathy for all those impacted by or involved in events; adjusting our behaviour to support, rather than pull against, what’s needed. Everyone purposefully involving themselves in working towards the ideals of a community seems quite beautiful, in many ways.

But is that what’s actually going on? How thorough an understanding of all the issues affecting society do we actually have? And, given the increasingly global nature of our lives, activities and conversations, how well-informed are we about the complexities of other communities and all they’ve been trying to bring about through their lives?

If every society’s working on its own version of “life” – dealing with its own struggles, heritage and vision – and we’re all attempting to cooperate within this new global space, surely it matters that we understand where we’re each coming from? Communities must have their own wounds, issues, preoccupations and internal forces at play, just as each person does at the individual level. (Notes Three)

Within it all – the personal dramas and collective problems – how are we to find a productive balance where the task of “understanding” isn’t too overwhelming and the paths to constructive engagement are clear? And, considering we probably have limited capacity to take things in and care deeply about them, how are we navigate this strangely distracting, volatile, emotive world of “information” we’re living within? (Notes Four)

Developing a thorough yet flexible enough understanding of this world – where things fit, why they matter, how best to respond – seems an incredible task for the future to rest upon.

Notes and References:

Note 1: What we create by our presence
Note 1: Connecting truthfully with life
Note 1: The philosopher stance
Note 2: Value in being informed
Note 2: Being trusted to use our discernment…
Note 2: In the deep end…
Note 3: Living as an open wound
Note 3: Conversation as revelation
Note 4: Attention as a resource
Note 4: What is the public conversation?
Note 4: Effect, if everything’s a drama

Thinking further about the value of understanding what we are doing, was one aspect of Cutting corners.

Thinking about what it means to be human, what are we to make of all the information now at our fingertips? Looking back to what “news” used to be, it really seems modern life’s expecting a lot from us in terms of processing large volumes of data, opinion and argument. Something few before “us” ever needed to deal with.

If we imagine that news was generally a fairly sporadic or local affair, the amount we’re now faced with seems almost incredible to comprehend (Notes One). In the place of limited, deliberate voices speaking about current affairs, we’ve got countless sources, agendas and perspectives vying for our attention at every moment. Our picture of the world constantly shifting, changing, updating.

What are we supposed to make of it? Given how much of all we’re told is about things we’ve got remarkably little influence over, what kind of outcome can we hope for? Beyond awareness and concern, we might attempt to shape our economic or political decisions in such a way that they become constructive forces for change. Within our social circle, we might try to spread awareness and shape others’ thinking.

Often, though, it seems almost paralysing: an inundation of insight into events far beyond our control that can easily leave us feeling completely powerless, resigned and frustrated at the state of this world (Notes Two). Becoming aware of everything, the world over, from every side is a momentous task; piecing together how separate events and attitudes feed into wider patterns can be as enlightening as it is depressing.

How are we to hold, in our minds, an ever-changing picture of events – from the local and personal all the way up to the global – then transform that into constructive, purposeful responses within our everyday lives? Sometimes it seems more likely to make us feel our own existence to be futile and insignificant compared with all that’s happening and our inability to affect change on the levels at which problems exist (Notes Three).

If we’re taking in information about things that we’re powerless to change, what’s happening “within us”? All this thought, concern or anger sparked by what we take in presumably wants to go somewhere. Learning about things in our local environment, avenues for involvement may be clearer; when news is remote and complicated, we’re perhaps just left with this ball of fruitless emotion.

Is it that we’re supposed to receive things with the right kind of feeling? Accompanying this mental reflection of life with sentiments appropriate to the situation so we stand “rightly” in relation to reality. Rather than gleefully or despairingly observing what bears little direct relation to us, bringing compassionate interest to the whole human community and all the ways our lives touch upon others.

Maybe awareness is simply a slow-burning sense of us all being present with the world’s journey? This ongoing discussion we’re all part of that, hopefully, extends the right thoughts and feelings towards those involved while strengthening and underlining our values in the process.

Notes and References:

Note 1: What is the public conversation?
Note 1: Reading between the lines
Note 1: Information might be there, but can we find it?
Note 2: Overwhelm and resignation
Note 2: Problems & the thought that created them
Note 3: Whether we make a difference
Note 3: Too much responsibility?
Note 3: Life’s never been simpler…
Note 3: What it is to be human

Alongside such thoughts, there are some parallels to “The Measure of a Man” from back in 2018.

Between all we hear and read each day, is there a space where both the truth of events and our best response to them become clear? As if, by finding our way through all the agendas, opinions and sensational curiosity baiting, there’s a place “the truth” of any given situation rests. Then, a response within us that can somehow match it and serve to bring essential values to life.

Because, often, it seems all the information being thrown at us is simply confusion: countless differing perspectives, interpretations or priorities clamouring to have us accept “their” version of events then live our lives accordingly (Notes One). Shaping the ideas people have in mind and act upon seems a lucrative business, for whatever reason.

With so many voices attempting to find their ways into our heads and influence the thoughts we’ll entertain there, isn’t it increasingly difficult to actually be sure of “truth”? Everything being so dialled up, so extreme, so emotive must risk desensitising us to the realities of life (Notes Two). As if the new base level for taking something seriously is this tense, screaming voice of impending doom. Can’t truth be spoken calmly?

In part, it’s perhaps because we’re now aware of so much and how many of our systems are interconnected: bringing “everything” to awareness, we can arguably create the changes necessary to eradicate all the many, many problems the world and its people are burdened with. This sense of everything both mattering and being connected, in some way, with suffering either now, in the past or in the future.

The world becoming conscious of itself and attempting to bring everything that matters to the table “must” be a recipe for overwhelm. Not only is life now more complex and demanding than even the fairly recent past, but we’re being asked to become aware of all the personal, global situations that have and do go into making our lives what they now are.

In that, how are we to tune out all the superfluous voices and tune into all those that convey the truth? How are we to gain a clear sense of how things stand and what all of our lives are playing into? Is it possible to get to that “place” where, in our minds, we can see the truth of our situation with all its multifaceted difficulties? Can the human mind still bend itself around “how we live” without crumpling under the pressure?

And, if we can, is there a clear path for how we might resolve things? How we might stand in the world with regard to every single thing that matters within it. How we might communicate these concerns without life descending into one argument after another. How we might handle this awareness of things outside our capacity for control without feeling completely powerless. (Notes Three)

If information is there to help us understand reality and choose wisely within it, how are we to assimilate all this and not be debilitated by it?

Notes and References:

Note 1: What is the public conversation?
Note 1: Information might be there, but can we find it?
Note 1: Caught in these thoughts
Note 1: Which voice can we trust?
Note 2: Effect, if everything’s a drama
Note 2: Desensitised to all we’re told?
Note 2: Is this the ultimate test?
Note 3: The value & cost of our words
Note 3: Thoughts of idealism and intolerance
Note 3: Ways thought adds spin to life
Note 3: Will things change if we don’t make them?
Note 3: Too much responsibility?