Sometimes, I find myself wondering exactly who sells so many of us on the idea that the only way to live your life is to constantly keep moving... and preferably at an ever-increasing pace?
There has to be a happy medium, somewhere.
A few days ago, we finished re-watching one of my all-time favorite shows along with the connected movie "Serenity." One of the premises from the movie I'm borrowing here was the idea that future civilization found a way to remove all the aggression and anger from humans, but the unexpected (and "government secret," of course!) side effect that was that people just completely lost their interest in doing anything to such a degree that they forgot to eat and sleep, and simply died.
That seems to be the opposite far end of the scale.
But there is value in slowing down.
Too Blurred...
I grew up in Europe and was raised with the idea of riding trains as a major form of transportation.
How is that relevant to anything?
Well, when you ride an express or "bullet" train, you are usually going fast enough that the nearby landscape becomes more or less a blur. At the very least, you have to concentrate really hard to be able to pick up much detail any closer than a few hundred yards away.
So it is with life; we run so fast in our quests to "get everything done" that we miss an awful lot of stuff in the process! Ironically, we are tasking ourselves with running so fast precisely in order to NOT miss anything!
But WHY do we run so much?
I suppose many of us were raised with the idea that our measure of accomplishment in life was directly tied to how much we produced, and did, and experienced.
"He/She who accumulates the biggest pile of shiny new toys, WINS."
I was never able to wrap myself around that particular philosophy, going all the way back to feigning a puncture on my bicycle on the way to parentally scheduled tennis lessons when I was ten... just so I could sit for a couple of hours and watch the wildlife at a particular pond in the nearby woods.
Of course, my mother would be furious, and insist that I would "never amount to anything, with that attitude."
Learning to Slow Down
Over the past year or so, I have been watching one of my favorite Hiveans @jaynie growing to appreciate life's alternatives to being an eternal Energizer Bunny. It is a beautiful thing when this epiphany happens organically, rather than as a result of a post-heart attack doctors' order.
Well done @jaynie, you're rocking it!
You can read one of her recent reflections here, well worth a read.
Societal Conditioning
But so often we have been conditioned to run... both by the external world as well as by our egos, and I find it both disturbing and alarming how many people's lives are governed by the functional need to keep going... because within the frameworks they have created, it takes running at full bore, 24/7/365 to keep their entire realities from collapsing inwards on themselves.
Indeed, there is definitely an element of "If we DON'T keep on running, 'THEY' will no longer be able to control us" in this equation, as it relates to the legacy economic structure that depends on eternal "growth" for its very survival.
What We Would All Wish For?
Meanwhile, Middle Son (31) is over from Seattle for the weekend.
He's an interesting example of how the cryptosphere is reaching further and further out into the mainstream of society. Just a few years ago, our kids thought we were pretty much nuts for being part of the whole crypto scene... now I have long conversations on the back porch with him about it.
He has been a dedicated gamer since his teens and now he's getting deeper and deeper inside the blockchain based "Play to Earn" movement... we even had a fairly lengthy conversation about Splinterlands and it seems likely that he'll join up.
Yay! But...
Take Note!
What's significant about it, though, was that I wasn't pitching Hive to him, I was pitching Splinterlands, and really... we were just having a conversation.
And to bring the whole ball of wax back on-topic, there's nothing he'd like more than not feel the pressure to eternally run through work and side jobs (Door Dash) just so he can afford rent, car, Internet and food. The idea — for him — of even making an extra $20-25 a day doing his favorite thing (gaming) would allow that slowdown I sense so many of us are looking for...
This thing about all this "running" we get addicted to is that most have no idea what they are running TO or whether what's at that destination is even what they are looking for.
As the old truism goes "Life is a Journey, not a Destination."
If you're always running so fast that the passing landscape is a blur... then you're not really getting the best of life!
Thanks for reading, and have a great week ahead!
How about YOU? How fast are YOU running? Do you know how to NOT run? Would your life (as you know it) collapse, if you stopped running? Are you afraid of stopping? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20210801 17:25 PDT
0312/1555