movements, viral ideas, works with impact and meaning, creative results and change from businesses and science
We are walking through interesting times, we humans. The world is going through a time of rapid change on a scope that is a mind-boggle. It’s all coming at us at a furious pace as we try to get some kind of handle on it. When our only effective weapons of defense are washing our hands with soap and water, avoiding sneezing and coughing at each other, and stepping far away from one another as the complex constructs we’ve built…
Green consumerism and eco-consumerism — a.k.a. “conscious” consumerism or “sustainable” consumerism – continues to gain ground, it says here. It may even be going mainstream as more and more shoppers get into trying to save the planet or save their own souls by making every purchase a “moral act” and by buying “right.”
I’ve been getting all tangled up in “selfs” lately. There’s self-awareness, self-esteem, self-worth, self-confidence, self-knowledge, self-image, self-respect, self-efficacy, and all the varied assortments of theory and blather about self-concepts. They do go on and on.
I’m coming off watching (again) Luam Keflezgy’s 2018 TEDxTalk, ‘The Art of Practical Daydreaming,” at TEDxPenn and I’m smiling big. It is a good one.
This was supposed to be an easy “nyah-nyah-nyah” sort of post. My plan was to crow about how, despite multitudinous prognostications to the contrary (all those declarations that “OMG! Poetry is dead, Dead, DEAD”), piling words together and mixing them up continues to flow unabated through the world, continues to move and heal a multitude of hearts, continues to evolve and grow and change even in this, our digitally enhanced post-modern world. No extinction is in sight.
In 2011, a video of a kid speechifying after learning to ride a bike went viral. His dad “interviewed” him after his accomplishment, asking him whether he had any “words of wisdom” for all the other kids who wanted to ride a bike.
One of the wisest thoughts I’ve ever encountered about impermanence is this one from English writer W. Somerset Maugham’s novel, THE RAZOR’S EDGE: “Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.” It reminds me of a Hawaiian aesthetic that holds that beauty is made more precious when we understand that it is ephemeral and will not last.
In America, dating since the original Social Security Act of 1935, retirement and making it intact to the “Golden Years,” (when you are supposedly free to stop working and “enjoy” lazing around in the little bit of life span you have left once you stop working) has been a gold-standard goal.
For the past few months, the Light of My Life and I have been showing up at the early Saturday-morning Upcountry Farmer’s Market fairly frequently. It has been some years since either of us visited the market.
Back in the ‘70’s I ran across a small book of distilled teachings taken from talks given by Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki, ZEN MIND, BEGINNER’S MIND. There was this quote in it: “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” It spoke to me, that quote, and I’ve spent a lifetime trying to unpack the thing.