One Small Thing Each Day
"Hell is the place where nothing connects" T. S. Eliot
I learn or re-learn so much everyday that it is really astonishing...
This was the lesson of today.
Hell is the place where nothing connects and this is just exactly how we are so easily manipulated. We all want so desperately to be connected and yet there is seemingly so much in the way.
Time for one thing, none of us has enough time...we work so hard and for so long. Our families are so far away that our lives don't intersect anymore and the conversations that would be necessary to bring everyone up to speed would take more time and require so much personal exposure it's difficult to make the choice to risk it....
And after a entire day of half faking it with your co-workers all anyone wants to do when they get home is close the door and let it all go. In fact, you often find that it's quite a relief to be actually alone and much less draining than the quasi- aloneness we through every day in our public interactions
In Howard Zin's, The People's History, of the United States, you will see it is exactly this disconnectedness that allows for so much manipulation. If you look at this book over again throughout history it was keeping the disenfranchised separate but loosely united around a few basic central themes, namely a highly proscribed version of patriotism and a paranoid sort of envy - if I support them they will take away from me - that allowed such things as slavery, genocide, sweatshops and all the gender inequities over the ages.
I am also reading, Killing Time by Caleb Carr, which paints a very plausible but fairly bleak view of where this unchecked "information age" could lead us in the next 20 years .... but what this all comes back to is humankind's two deepest fears:
1. the fear of isolation - that bone deep knowledge that we really do go through this pretty much alone
2. the fear of death - not just our own physical death but total annihilation of the thing we call self, our history, our life , our people
Control these fears...or better yet promise a way to alleviate these fears - create a club or write a blog :) or some social construct and you will have followers, you will become a leader. A leader has power. Power fights fear...
But the real thing I am asking here. The real thing I am trying to start here, is not the illusion of group because there already is a group. I just want to connect with it and to help others connect with it. There are so many separate parts of the same process we are far less effective than if we were to unite as one.
It's like if we all do one small thing each day, everyday - to reach out and consciously say, I care. And I Am going to try to be proactive and positive to my fellow human being and to our beautiful planet.
I believe that if we do this then eventually we will see our world change for the better.
At least let's try
-elena
I learn or re-learn so much everyday that it is really astonishing...
This was the lesson of today.
Hell is the place where nothing connects and this is just exactly how we are so easily manipulated. We all want so desperately to be connected and yet there is seemingly so much in the way.
Time for one thing, none of us has enough time...we work so hard and for so long. Our families are so far away that our lives don't intersect anymore and the conversations that would be necessary to bring everyone up to speed would take more time and require so much personal exposure it's difficult to make the choice to risk it....
And after a entire day of half faking it with your co-workers all anyone wants to do when they get home is close the door and let it all go. In fact, you often find that it's quite a relief to be actually alone and much less draining than the quasi- aloneness we through every day in our public interactions
In Howard Zin's, The People's History, of the United States, you will see it is exactly this disconnectedness that allows for so much manipulation. If you look at this book over again throughout history it was keeping the disenfranchised separate but loosely united around a few basic central themes, namely a highly proscribed version of patriotism and a paranoid sort of envy - if I support them they will take away from me - that allowed such things as slavery, genocide, sweatshops and all the gender inequities over the ages.
I am also reading, Killing Time by Caleb Carr, which paints a very plausible but fairly bleak view of where this unchecked "information age" could lead us in the next 20 years .... but what this all comes back to is humankind's two deepest fears:
1. the fear of isolation - that bone deep knowledge that we really do go through this pretty much alone
2. the fear of death - not just our own physical death but total annihilation of the thing we call self, our history, our life , our people
Control these fears...or better yet promise a way to alleviate these fears - create a club or write a blog :) or some social construct and you will have followers, you will become a leader. A leader has power. Power fights fear...
But the real thing I am asking here. The real thing I am trying to start here, is not the illusion of group because there already is a group. I just want to connect with it and to help others connect with it. There are so many separate parts of the same process we are far less effective than if we were to unite as one.
It's like if we all do one small thing each day, everyday - to reach out and consciously say, I care. And I Am going to try to be proactive and positive to my fellow human being and to our beautiful planet.
I believe that if we do this then eventually we will see our world change for the better.
At least let's try
-elena
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