Friday, September 16, 2011

Roadmap to Self

In Pursuit of A Mission Statement

Join Me
I was a technologist, a businessman, an idealist, and someone with chronic pain. I'm also an armchair psychologist, yogi, and a dancer. I'd like to bring all of these elements into a connected, creative, and inspired life. In fact, I'd like to create a community of support for continued awakening in me and us. This will inevitably involve destruction and creation. It's a long and rugged road, but at least it's got a soundtrack.

Destruction
I'd like to deconstruct the things that I've become, the things that we've become, together. When I talk to my friends, I feel our generation accidentally backed itself into a corner. Delayed gratification corrupted us during the delay and jaded us with its gratification. We persevered our way to somebody else's dream. I want to examine how:
  • Science didn't save us. We expected a perfect understanding of our bodies and communities, but our humanity was averaged away, and we didn't avoid financial crisis or disease. We employed reason to prove ourselves right, not to approach truth.
  • Business didn't make us. We wanted to learn how to get things done, but found surprising bureaucracies, rationalized economies of scale, money was not motivating, large obvious problems routinely ignored. We need a vacation to rediscover our sense of self.
  • Idealism didn't sustain us. We believed in inspiring institutions until we learned many were counterproductive or even lying. At the root of our idealism itself, we found paternalism, insecurity, ambition, and moralism.
  • Our bodies took a toll. We created from our work life many stress-related disorders and unquenchable anxieties, and medicine could not resolve them. We "exercise" to counteract our inherent life imbalance.
  • We got disconnected. Through our work and despite our social network, we compromised our connection to our bodies, souls, communities, and the earth. We have lost our natural creativity, our birthright of inspiration.

Creation
I'd like to reclaim inspiration from all that I've been. So I'm asking all of my friends, the distributed storehouse of my mind, "What have you found most inspiring recently?" I'll share a few ways I've learned to interact with the world in a more spontaneous, connected manner, drawn from spirit trackers, meditation, and my imagination. Some of these will be unfathomably crazy ideas, but possibly worth entertaining for just a moment. I hope that some of these are practical ideas, useful as you think about your own life. I hope to take enough risks and make enough mistakes to propel me forward towards reimagining myself.

4 comments:

saimad said...

IMO, every system is more sustainable until there are checks and balances. The universe had it all squared right with a system of predator-prey until the human race beat this simple system. Now we continue to evolve out of control, but I trust that the system will establish a balance - through various systemic natural stress relievers such as quakes, drought etc. Yes, it's going to be painful but we do more horrible things to each other than nature ever can/will. When we run out of resources(not if), we are likely take each other out.

Aquarian said...

we build a construct, layer emotion and expectations on that construct, punish ourselves when our expectations don't merge with reality. The simplicity of being eludes us, hence the quest. Inspiration arises from the ability to "see" in the purest sense.

Diane said...

A - I think you are very inspiring. I like that you stop and think about yourself and your place in the world. I like how you identify a goal and drop everything to try to pursue it. I think it inspires everyone else to think about who they are and where they are going, and to redirect themselves if they feel that they have been waylaid unknowingly.

eudae said...

@saimad - yeah, i talked with a professor at stanford recently who asked me not to condemn all systems, as they are all anyway built on humans, and we are all flawed.

@aquarian - exactly! it's our layered expectation that ends up filtering our perception and reality, and occluding inspiration.

@diane - yeah, i'm trying to bring this self-reflection out... it's been a blessing and a curse. i hope it's useful for some, we'll see :)