What is it about us humans that makes us so resistant to change and growth? Why does it take the equivalent of near personal catastrophe for us to remove our heads from our asses and realize where the stench is coming from?! Yes, I am at times a bit cynical, but really, it's the truth. I have got catalogs of examples from my own life, and more recently I am becoming aware of it in the lives of people I am (or once was) close to. I wonder what would happen if we all had that ah-ha moment, you know the one where you realize that after all these years it was you who held the key to your own destiny...
Please get, I am not taking a dualistic viewpoint here- I do not believe that those who make the decision to get up off the couch of their lives and make things happen are necessarily better than those who continue to toke on the joint of complacency. Complacency can be comfortable, if we wriggle around now and then and adjust ourselves so as not to have our entire body succumb to the pins and needles of apathy, it can be a very warm and familiar place. And let's face it... growing up, maturing, setting goals for oneself and developing some sort of mantra from which to live by-aint no immediate buzz... I suppose if anything it is the buzz kill for complacency... generally evolving as a being has little immediate gratification- it is not likely that the decision to go to school, or get a new job, or move, or any others of the major life decisions we all have to make at some point are going to result in some amazing and immediate high...
Nope, change comes with an entirely different set of feelings- some that are difficult, many that are good, but all are rewarding in some way, shape, or form. As opposed to those days of excess-long lost to work, school, families and responsibilities- growing teaches us how to sustain that good feeling we lived for as kids- we still enjoy peaks (although, most often not the chemically induced ones of days of yore-why? there is no need!), but now those peaks are sweeten with the addition of valleys. Of course, not even someone making the conscious effort to expand their awareness likes to be in those valleys, but after a certain point we come to realize how much more brilliant and rich those peaks are for it.
So, to those of you fighting the good fight to figure out yourself and your place in this world, to those of you making an effort to go about your life emulating positivity and awareness, to those of you committed to doing whatever you have to in order to be your best self, to those of you struggling to figure out what that looks like to you-I raise my glass to you. Making our state or country or world a better place starts with each one of us at the most personal level. If we can first commit to ourselves, we can then take that commitment to the streets! To those of you immersed in the murky bong water of complacency,your life is waiting for you to live it-so come on up for air....
