Where is the cure for being human?
Truth Corner
I tell the truth about my life in this corner. I tell the truth about who I am & what I experience.
“They have made it so hard for us to be human.” said Seth Godin in one of his talks. And it stuck with me.
We live in an efficiency/productivity worship era. We are expected to do more in less time in a consistent progress.
We live in an economical model of endless growth which in turn reflects back to how we see our lives: an upward trajectory. We are supposed to get more successful and accumulate more stuff over time.
Work transitioned from a means to an end to a place you need to find your passion. This is an amazing manipulation machine. It forces us to put more time for the same pay thus making companies richer. But, it is a false promise. The amount of people who found meaningful work is way lower than society is trying to make us believe.
We live in an illusion of connection. We think we are in touch with people just because we saw their story on vacation or at the new hip cafe they visited.
We lost faith. Nobody talks about it as much as we should but we lost sense of meaning from our lives as a result of it. We lost the humbling feeling of our smallness and the awe of creation. Everything became analytical and controllable. Thus, anxiety arose as we can’t actually control future and we can’t cope with the fact that we can’t.
We can open our phones and see people who are infinitely better than us in some aspect. Capitalism wants to be aware of that. It also wants us to believe if we tried hard enough and bought their magical products whether it is a home fitness vehicle, shiny facial mask or a jean that makes your ass look bigger, we could get there.
Thus, we live with a sense of not measuring up and feeling ashamed by it. If we were disciplined enough, if we only had what it takes to do this life right, we could reach all of that. So we are endlessly trying to reach (and fail) an illusion of future “ideal” reality where we are travelling the world, having the biggest adventures, having amazing sex, have a dream job and have the perfect body.
It is all too exhausting.
I can feel the restlessness in my body when I sit to meditate, who wants to be some place else, who wants to endlessly do stuff and achieve stuff and acquire stuff.
I can’t just be here and enjoy. What kind of life is that?
I recently remembered a chilhood memory that I hadn’t taught about in years.
As a child, I would make potions from water and spieces in the house. I believed if I could find the perfect mix of spieces with water, I could create the magic of life. I would mix things up in a glass and pour the water to grass and inspect if anything unsual happened.
I experimented with different mixes of speices not only in our house but in all the other houses I visited.
One day, in my uncle’s place, I did the same thing: mixed the ingridients, pour the glass from the balcony to the soil and waited until the next day to check it out.
And, unexpectedly, there was something weird in the place I poured my potion. I don’t remember what it was but I remember feeling endless joy that my experiment worked and I created magic.
Before I created the magic, I experimented with maybe hundreds of mixture of spieces without feeling let down, or anxious due to lack of results because I was playing. I was playful in my experiments that meant I wasn’t doing it for the result itself, the act of experimentation was fun in and of itself so I kept on playing.
Where is that sense of play? Where is room for experimentation?
Everything in our lives right now can be made into a 10 item list or summarized into a twitter thread that doesn’t really say much or anything new but gets hundreds of likes anyways.
Any hobby you might pick up, any interest becomes a property to display in social media (not just as an act of play or generosity to others) but as an attempt to create an asset for yourself. I am sometimes quilty of this instinct as well.
Although, my body is restless, wants to escape right here, right now, I want to stay here.
I want to play, experiment and not expect anything in return.
Maybe I create magic at the end, maybe I don’t. I guess that is not the point.
The point is to be able to tolarate discomfort of being a human these days enough to make room for play & experiment.
So, let’s play, dear reader. Let’s play.
Little Gems
I read, I listen, I watch everyday. As I heard Rebacca Solnit say “I want better metaphors. I want better stories. I want more openness. I want better questions. All these things give us tools that helps us with amazing possibilities and terrible realities we face”. Here, I share some of the little gems I found in the process.
✍️A quote I am obsessed with:
The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.
Frank Herbert (He shares what he heard from a nun).
📚A passage worth reading:
When you notice something beautiful…
Do you let the beauty hit you before you rush to take a picture?
When you attempt to capture something, do you alter its very nature?
Can you sit with the uncertainty like God’s other creatures?
Do you have to freeze a memory to immortalize its features?
Do you need to prove that you were there in order to exist?
Do you crave the recognition in a way you can’t admit?
Do you wrestle with impermanence, with poison on your lips?
Do you resist the emptiness by trying to imprison bliss?
🎧A podcast to really listen:
“Now the elegance of karma yoga is, the very act you do to help another person is simultaneously the act you’re doing to work on yourself. Like, I am helping you now, at some level, but this act is my work on myself. Because the clearer I get, the better my help is for you. So I’m serving as an act to work on myself; I am working on myself as an act to better serve you. Can you see how the circle works? Can you see the elegance of that?” – Ram Dass
📹A video to induce “A-ha” moments:
Tara Brach invites us to examine the 1) deepest intentions we have and 2) the intentions we bring to every-day circumstances.
For example, I realized I enter most of the work meeting with the intention to just be done with them. My daily unconcious intention is to stay safe and avoid discomfort.
But the intentions I want to have are completely different. Now, when I wake up, I listen deeply inside and understand my intentions - change it if I need to.
I check in with my intentions throughout the day as they have an inpact on how I show up.
When you listen closely what are your intentions?