Are We Nuts, Hypocrites or Just Plain Scared?

The title of this blog series is “Exploring the Better Future.” In this post I would like to explore why people fail to do what we know would be best for all of us.

Each of us is completely unique. Even twins are different. So why do we try so hard to be the same as everyone else and conform to some standard we made up?

We yearn for love and companionship yet hold ourselves back when it comes to expressing our affections and emotions with people we care about.

So many of us complain, publicly or inwardly, about the very same things we enable and empower through our silence or apathy.

We say we want relief from the hectic, stress-filled lifestyle yet we are quick to fill in each empty moment with something, maintaining the very busy-ness we claim to detest.

Many of us say we want community, yet we avoid contact with people as they walk by or avoid talking to anyone we don’t know. We choose to communicate through technology rather than in-person.

We claim to want people to be authentic and real yet do our part in protecting our sacred images of ourselves, withholding our vulnerabilities and private secrets.

Look at all the ways we say one thing yet do another, sometimes knowingly and sometimes unconsciously. This is co-opting ourselves, forcing ourselves into lives of wheel-spinning double-mindedness and energy-sapping inner-conflictedness.

Why do we do this? Are we so afraid of being who we are, so afraid of living the lives we say we want to live?

Could it be we trust more in our mind and all its manufactured opinions and beliefs than we do in our heartfelt values and deeper yearnings? Could it be we have allowed our minds, our egoistic “thought machines,” to become the slave masters of our lives while subjugating our hearts to the prisoner life of unrequited happiness?

How about breaking the chains we have placed on our own hearts and demoting our minds from master to servant?  How do we do that? It just might be a time to turn things over to a Higher Power, a power greater than ourselves - call it Nature, Providence (as the founders of the U.S. did), or God, however we might imagine that God to be.

And it always helps to get unreasonable. My favorite quote in this regard comes from George Bernard Shaw, adapted to modern language: “The reasonable person adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.”

Comments

[K.A.]

George Bernard Shaw IS a modern writer in the modern era who used modern language. (He died in 1950.) He is not some medieval poet whose work needs to be "adapted to modern language." That is his actual quote.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."