Living In Subtle Disharmony
Human beings have a very strange relationship with time. We have fabricated time, through constructed clocks and made up ideas. We forcefully overlay systems that are out of sync with nature and we wonder why we never quite feel harmonious.
We wake up to alarms, we meet on the command of beeps, we rush to get somewhere on ‘time’, distort ourselves to fit it all in, yell at our kids to reach made-up deadlines and with greater precision to these systems, we never create more space, only ever squeeze more in.
In early humanism, the sun came up, humans did things appropriate to do in the day, the sun went down and we hid away from the nighttime things much bigger and hungrier than ourselves. Then about 3500 - 5000 years ago the Babylonians and the Egyptians started to play with this idea of making moments more precise. Water clocks and sundials fashioned calendars and schedules, we began to organise more astutely in the context of time.
Fast forward to the 21st century (even that a constructed measure of time based on the passing of years, determined by a calendar so mind-breakingly out of sync with nature it hurts just to think about) and we’ve all but forgotten how to live in nature’s rhythms. Our rhythm of 28 day cycles with the waxing and waning moon, in relationship with our orbits around the sun, distorted into the nauseating shape of the Gregorian calendar, with it’s sickening 30/31 day lengths and ludicrous 12 months per annum, leaving everyone of us - whether we realise it or not - in a constant state of misalignment.
Organisation is an absolutely wonderful thing, in fact, it is essential. It has become our duty for our own health however, it is more imperative than ever to be ever-watchful of how reliant we are on the purely human systems of things, such as engineered time over natural time, and ensure that the nature in us remains consciously connected to the bigger weave of nature:
What is the weather like today?
How will that effect my internal weather?
How can I minimise aggravations and maximise the benefits?
What is the nature of the season?
How does the position of the sun influence my internal organ function and energy levels? How does the moon influence me?
How does the rain, wind or heat affect me?
When should I eat, when should I sleep, when shall we gather, when shall we plant?
Based on the natural world, not just the electronic one.
All of these types of musings became dangerous in terms of the Witch Trials and then patronised into naivety in relation to the industrial ‘revolution’ - the largest yank of human’s out of nature and into economic systems in our history - so much so, that even to this day to speak about these very basic fundamentals of our place within our environments or their affects on us, is relegated as woo woo, rather than the simple science that it is.
Our motion of production as individuals continues to speed up, even with the endless promise of technology wearing the burden of labour, freeing us up to….? Reconnect with nature? We would bloody hope so but if not careful, will it be a drifting further away? Into false creations of simulated nature?
Whilst these reflections can have an air of dystopianism about them, that is not the purpose of this little tale. The reality of it is, is that for many people they are already on the cusp or well and truly falling into the abyss of world’s that give them a complete sense of control. Virtual worlds and AI ‘friendships’. Swimming in the streams of social media feeds - but who is feeding on who? These words or not meant to construe ‘die, technology, die!’ Not at all, the nuance is not love or loathe but how can what we create serve what is most important. Which is our relationships: with nature, with each other and with ourselves.
Awareness is everything. There has never been a more important or potent time to be asking ourselves:
Where do I want to be going?
Who do I want to be?
What do I want my life to look like?
What do I love?
How do I feed the above?
These paradigms that we live in, were made up by someone. They are not the be all and end all. In fact, many are outright harmful. And so often we forget our worth in conversations and we don’t speak up to suggest doing things differently. We’re afraid of challenging the status quo and sometimes that can be very hard, particularly if we’re conditioned to believe that it’s not our place.
BUT with love, with genuine kindness in our hearts, we can create so many opportunities to be heard. We can make friends with those who are supposed to be our enemies, we can see beyond the labels and the subcultures and simply see the human underneath. The human that is scared or suffering or simply wanting like almost everyone, to be safe and happy too.
Can we change the world with compassion? I’m not yet convinced that the experience of humans as a species is about working toward a bigger more esoteric goal of unified peace, my work tells me that yes, we are all capable of incredible change but discrimination is written into the fabric of what it means to be human. Our job, those who want to human a little better, is to be willing to look at our discriminations with eyes wide open and hold a willingness to work at dissolving them a little more, each and every day.
Can the world be changed with compassion? Of course and it is, every single day. For every terrible action there are thousands, millions of people doing good actions. Our big choice moment to moment to moment, is: which action will harm and which action will heal?
Try to find the beautiful things today but also let yourself cry when it all feels too much. Hug a lot. Move your body every morning, you won’t have it forever. Say kind words as often as you can, particularly to those who seem like they haven’t seen a lot of kindness. Go gently, gently, hati, hati.