Something that I’ve been feeling very strongly recently is the importance of being active. We need to be able to take action in some way. […]
There’s a lot more potential than we imagine. Because there’s ways to do things and change things that we haven’t even imagined yet. And maybe once they’re imagined, they become possible. We have the ability to make changes. Even if at the big-picture scale we can’t snap our fingers or do a day’s work and somehow make some kind of grand change on the scale of the whole world, but we can make very significant changes locally, within our own lives, within the lives of people around us and our local environments. You could spend one day helping some people cleaning up and ordering the environment, starting some kind of a program, carrying out an activity, making some kind of of a local change that has a real effect. And this is possible. And I’ve been thinking about this because I find a lot of the conversation around me, there’s a lot of lamentation about the way the world is, the state of politics and social issues, and a sense of exasperation about oh, look what those people are doing now. Look what they’re doing now. Look what happened now. Look what the next thing is that they’re doing to us. And although all of that, it’s all valid observations, and it’s not to minimize that at all, but to be too focused on what they’re doing to us, and the way the system is set up, is taking away, it’s undervaluing, what we can actually do. And it puts us in this state of passively receiving whatever other people do. And I can see this in myself, that when I get into that state, when I give up on what I can do, and I just accept that certain things are being done to me, and certain things are the way they are, and there’s nothing I can do about it: when I get into that state, I start to get a lot of bad vibes, a lot of negative emotions that start to come up. It’s like as soon as I turn off that part of me that is making plans, making strategies, imagining things to do, taking action, and it just becomes this like shaking my fist, shaking my fist at the bad people, or the system, the way things are: oh, why does it have to be that way? […]
I’m seeing more clearly now how this is where feelings of hate come from. Resentment. Envy. And this kind of bitterness. That when I feel cut off from what I want, and that I have no path towards what I want, then I’m left with this this feeling of just like powerless rage, of just being stuck, and just having a very negative reaction, without any feeling that I can do anything about it. So that’s my thought for today. We need a path. We need to have a path from where we are to where we want to be. We don’t need to know the entire route. It may not be clear at all. These are very tricky situations and tricky problems. There’s no clear path. We don’t need to know all the steps. But we need to at least believe that there is a path possible, and we can at least imagine some bit of it, some step we can take, that in some small way moves us away from the bad things and towards the good things in some way. We have to believe that there is some action available to us. And that way, that energy that we feel, and the frustration, and the pain, and the feeling of seeing all the things that are wrong: it has to go somewhere. It has to go into some kind of useful action, even on a very small scale. It cannot be blocked. If we are cut off from what we want, and we give up on it, and we say OK, that there’s no way. I want something, but I’ll never have it. I don’t want this thing, but I’m stuck with it forever. As soon as we surrender to that state, and we stop believing that we can do anything about it, then you can feel all the bad vibes rising, and that feeling of everything negative just comes out, as we’re just in this stuck hole, and full of that kind of… it’s like this kind of poison that builds up. And if we’ve been in that state for a long time, it is not easy to immediately get out of it, because it’s so built up. But I believe it can start with just any kind of action, even the smallest, most local action, so that we can feel that we actually have some power, some agency, some ability, and that we’re actually alive. It’s such a basic part of being alive is that we can actually do things. We can actually do things. And that’s what we have to do. Whatever it is in your particular corner of the world, your particular immediate environment, you have the ability to do things that maybe you haven’t even yet imagined doing. But I think now’s the time to start imagining and start doing even the smallest actions, and to get some good things started.