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ACCORDING TO LIZ - What does it mean to be a human being? What brings us fulfillment? Will I be famous, will I be rich? Can I accept “Qué será, será?”
We live surrounded by pressure to achieve, to over-achieve. To win scholarships, to win trophies, to be first. To live longer, to get one’s name in the Guinness Book of World Records. To have one’s face on the front page, one’s name plastered across buildings. To win wars.
But does doing these things make us happy?
Is claiming success more of a success than having humility, acknowledging one’s own ignorance and opening one’s heart and mind to new opportunities. Curiosity is a gift that can only be explored by acknowledging our own limitations.
The desire and then the ability to change oneself is the first step; honesty and the release of arrogance, the next.
Acknowledging the worst presages the beginning of hope. The gut truth of whom we are is the beginning of rebirth.
In a world of growth above all possible sustainability, mankind’s drive for more and more has created a system out of whack, both on the macro and individual level.
We live suspended in precarious times, in imbalance, and are precipitously failing in the struggle to regain equilibrium.
If in the past, the wheel of life was a cycle leading to wholeness and completeness, the mad, mad fluctuations of the solitary focus on Wall Street profits for past decades has become a sickness, a source of disunity and divisiveness, a rending of health and community.
As Wendell Berry has pointed out in numerous essays and interviews, the detachment of communities from the natural world they occupy, the farmer from the land from which they make a living, is destroying what it means to be human, to share the wonders of the world with that world.
Just because tractors are faster and don’t need rest doesn’t make them better than mules. When the machinery of modern Big Ag crushes the soil and poisons it with cycles of herbicides, artificial fertilizers, and pesticides, pollutes the air and water, and requires that fields be reshaped to its needs, obliterating the natural contours of the land leading to erosion, losing nutrients in runoff, harming the rotation of growing food and returning it to the earth.
When its limitations mandate monoculture, depleting the soil and leaving plants vulnerable to predatory insects and blights, laying whole farms to waste instead of a few individual crops.
When the profitability of GMO-enhanced plants leads corporations to sterilize seeds forcing family farmers into bankruptcy or into peonage to the Cargills, Monsantos (now a subsidiary of Bayer) and Syngentas and, because they are no longer allowed to grow food instead of cash crops, to starvation, what quality of life do people have?
This materialist fundamentalism has led to the angst and emptiness of modern sterility and barrenness, an emptiness that can never be filled or fulfilled.
When the cancer of progress is confronted by the beauty of nature, it gets angry and tries to destroy what is beautiful just because it can, because it can never aspire to what is natural.
People crave connection. Especially today, we need to find a way to escape a lonely life isolated on screens.
In fact, it would be a pretty sad existence if everyone stayed in their own shells; even the best Chatbot can’t suppress loneliness forever
The stories people tell of those they respect the most are full of tales of individuals rising above disasters survived, difficult work lives, andchallenging childhoods, to become inspirations to others.
The best of these weren’t the go-it-alone old-school heroes of the American West but human beings who relied on and were motivated by family and friends. In the faced of unimaginable losses, there are always laughs to remember.
While fearing failure, no-one can succeed in life without taking risks.
The dangers today are manifold, magnified by a generational inequality.
The reliance on averages rather than the individual realities, metrics rather than feelings, figures over lived experience, disengages the joy and diversity of actual people from profit.
With the shrouds of mist descending over everyone’s future, the survival of the world itself is in question.
To combat this, to roll back institutionalized brain fog, to develop resilience, what can people do?
What do they regret the most?
Too often, instead of achieving what they think they want, far too many end up with what they don’t want.
But with all the choices promoted on social media, by well-meaning parents and teachers and friends in a world about to come apart at the seams, how can a person select options that work for them?
In fighting off all comers for the golden ring, are they losing out on community? On sharing experiences with friends and family?
In stoically forging ahead alone on a stony path, do they ignore the many small kindnesses, both the joy of giving and receiving, that make up a life?
In forever striving for something better, a goal based on things that are never enough, are they missing out on the satisfaction of being in the present? In being human beings and community members, not isolated specialists acting out some predestined role, in doing rather than existing in reaction to events without any self-determination.
By avoiding fear, do they risk never achieving happiness?
Instead of looking for cues outside, how about searching within?
What functions do they enjoy playing with friends and family, what brings satisfaction and happiness?
Do they thrive as a tutor or planner? Do they revel in roles as counselor or coach?
Rather than demonstrating mankind’s power by pounding boot prints into the natural world, how about developing compassion and caution in interactions with people and planet, embracing personal decency and that age-old adage: “first do no harm” and, in the Quaker way, take care of ourselves and others by walking in the light.
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
