“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, that you can walk with Love and Reverence” Henry David Thoreau.
Sovereignty is about having the right to choose what you do, and I might add, the willingness to do so. You may not like the choices but when you are sovereign being you know why you are choosing, even if you disagree with the options. If you feel victimized and manipulated, choose something that empowers you that ‘they’ cannot take way. You don’t have to be combative and angry to be sovereign, which allows you to step out of victimhood and be empowered in your choices to be as authentic as you can be within the circumstances. Viktor Frankl was confined in four Nazi concentration camps but he was empowered in his sovereignty to choose how HE responded to the conditions such that he guards could never crush his spirit. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned under Apartheid for 27 years, but he chose to respond nobly to how he handled the conditions of his imprisonment, so much so that after he was released, he kept what would have been a bloody revolution by his insistence on the Reconciliation and Forgiveness policy to keep peace under his presidency.
There is a 1991 film ‘Regarding Henry’ about an injured man who wakes up with full amnesia and inability to do even the simplest tasks. He relearns how to function again, but without all the memories, he has become a different person. We like to live the dramatic story of who we think we are, complete with conditioning and emotional baggage based on all our experiences. Yet, if you were to wake up tomorrow morning with complete amnesia, who would you be? If you could reinvent yourself like that, what kind of person would you choose to now become, for that is really a clear sign of how you love, or not, yourself?
We live within a Separation cosmology – and part of that cosmology is the achievement problem. We only tend to do things we are good at, and not because we enjoy doing them anyway. I know rock climbers who just enjoy being on the rock and feeling the air below their feet. They are not ‘good’ in that they can push themselves in to the higher grades that seem to be the preserves of super humans who climb like flies, but they enjoy the sport simply because it is there. We are conditioned to spend so much time trying to excel, that we dismiss the many experiences we would enjoy doing even though we might feel we are inept when doing them. So, what if you are a bad piano player, play for yourself if you enjoy tickling the keys. Individual sovereignty is about doing what inspires you. We are so conditioned to only do what we are supposedly good at and if you are one of those people who are a jack of all trades with no special talents, you end up being discouraged with your life.
Writer Kurt Vonnegut tells a story of when he was a kid being questioned by an adult. The adult asked lot of questions, “Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject?” Vonnegut told him that he didn’t play any sports, but that he did do theater, sing in a choir, play the violin and piano, and take art classes. The adult was quite amazed, but Vonnegut quickly responded, “but I’m not any good at ANY of them.” Vonnegut explains that simply doing these is the point of doing them. “You’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them…And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could ‘Win’ at them” Kurt Vonnegut.
When I ran my Sustainability Studies program, I had to have a faculty steering committee. One of my faculty was a die-hard pessimist and to every idea I offered said it can’t work. I eventually faced him down and told him, “Stop talking about what is wrong with the existing system and focus on making what we have better!” We want a world of harmony and unity. Unity in a future sustainable society is not some form of homogenized conformity, but a complete validation of all the unique aspects of every one of us, all nearly 7.9 billion of us at this time. A metaphor I heard is that we are like individuated pieces of a jigsaw puzzle picture. It takes all of these pieces to make the picture complete. Let’s celebrate our diversity of talents and interests.
The solution to becoming sustainable is actually simple, yet perhaps is the one most people will not accept since it means breaking out of the mindset we currently live within. Why this is so difficult is amazing. We want a better world, and it is literally within our grasp here and now, but it means freeing ourselves from the constraints of old worldviews and moving into a new way of thinking – literally an ecological worldview. It means sharing and not hoarding. It means accepting that abundance is already here and that an economy based on scarcity is not only outdated but completely misleading and extremely disempowering.
I have spent several posts talking about you and not about the bigger picture of how we need restructure society. Eric Hoffer wrote a wonderful treatise about how people often lose themselves within Mass Movements (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements) that all too often turn into fanatical upheavals. It’s not about creating a new centralized system to lead us onwards. Look where that has gotten us in this past century, e.g., Nazi Fascism, Russian and Chinese Communism, Globalized Monopolistic Corporatism, etc. They all superseded Hegemonic National Colonialism that dominated since the late 1400s, but few can claim they have been improvements overall for the individual or the planet. The Renaissance was not so much a revolution, but a transition of great social change where unique individuals were somewhat freed from old religious and cultural constraints to be able to express themselves (e.g., Leonardo Davinci, Copernicus, Shakespeare, etc.…), but old hierarchical orders were still maintained. It’s finally time to move away from the concept of global and even regional centralization and back to localized systems where we can all express our innate brilliance. And instead of only doing what we think we are good at, play at what we enjoy doing all the while using the talents we do have to help and cultivate community building at its most fundamental and organic way.
“Self-empowerment is about putting positive thoughts into positive action” Michael Roads. After this past year of draconian lockdowns, everyone is eager to ‘get back to normal’ forgetting just how stressed the situation was before the lockdowns. We are so locked into the mindset of ‘Sameness’ that we seem all too willing to give up ourselves to just get back to what was before. I think that the lockdown has awakened many to realizing just how much fun can be had when we are not booged down with a set occupational routine. I don’t think people are adverse to working, but they are adverse to boredom and uber-paced, repetitive, stressful jobs that often occur because of too much specialization with unrealistic achievement expectations. I do in all honesty think we are ALL here to explore and enjoy life and not simply exist. Individualism is about uniqueness, self-sufficiency, independence and autonomy, but it is not necessarily antithetical to community building. Indeed, I would argue that it increases diversity at all levels and improves community resilience.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment” Ralph Waldo Emerson.
To Be Continued ……………………
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