engage

This is what I have to say to women, to men, to anyone with a cognitive process, a brain, arms and legs and heart: Use them. All of them. Use them to their full potential, to your best ability, all the time. Use them for good and use them for each other, use them to encourage more laughter in the world, more empathy, more honesty and more life. 

We, as a human species, have a responsibility to turn on our brains, to tune in our bodies, to strengthen our hearts and hands and minds to prepare for a new reality. So many things we have learned, through our nearly catastrophic failures as a species in the past, we have then repeated. From the grand horror of war to the ever present experience of heartbreak,  with every lesson comes a period of remembrance and then an episode of forgetfulness. We have to re-learn our past mistakes with each new generation, sometimes seemingly with each new experience, forever participating in a crazy cycle that has run us to a point of near destruction. 

Your mind, your body and your lifetime upon this planet--those are the greatest tools you, you as one individual person in an unfathomably vast sea of people, you as one tiny, insignificant blip on the timespan of the planet upon which we walk, those are the tools that you were given. And we continue, again and again, to mis-use them, to depress them with fears and social anxieties and bad parenting and astoundingly trivial monetary disputes. Especially distressing is the degree to which women depress their potential with superficial, vain concerns--it is time to accept as fact the experience that when your body, your very vessel of life, is treated with respect and care, it is beautiful. When it is fed properly, exercised, watered and showered with positive attention it will be beautiful, you will be beautiful.  I am assuming that by reading this article you are affluent and lucky enough to be able to provide yourself most of these amenities if you so should decide--America can be an incredibly bountiful land and we are very, very lucky to be living in it. 

Our physical appearance, however, takes up far too much of our time, too much of our brainpower. So many women i know spend a large portion of their young adult to near adult lives nearly obsessing over this image of self--I know I did. An experienced bulimic, I can speak quite frankly on the ills and truths of consuming one's mind with shallow self-loathing. It is a waste of time, an insult to the future and a depression on the past to call yourself anything but beautiful. It is also a feat of incredible bravery to stare into a mirror and speak the words, "lovely."

We have to find a way to expedite our abilities to retain the knowledge of the lessons we learn in our lifetime. With the loss of oral history and family sense, and the amazing disconnects created by our increasingly digitized world, we can learn a lesson and then forget it faster than ever before. Consider the last time you were physically injured. Spend a few seconds dwelling on the sensations of pain, the frustration, the fear. Don't linger too long, but stay long enough to recall the promises that those emotions and physical reactions generated in your person. Promises like, "I will never take my _____ for granted again," or , "from now on, I will avoid leaping before i look," or, "I will pay attention when I am hammering." Easy enough, but how long did those passionate promises last? That freight train of disaster can, of course and with astounding ease, be applied to our relationships--if we aren't obsessing over our looks we are certainly gossiping about our relationships, creating patterns to our story that we do not even recognize and may never escape. 

Unless, we heighten. We take the time and do the work to create patterns of a new design. The brain is a function of patterning--a series of habitual and organic thoughts slung together through a series of incredible feats of anatomical genius. All those neurons firing and muscles twitches and mitochondria mitochrondria-ing just to bring us back around again, full circle? Lets progress from that. The patterns that create your reality can be uplifting or cause you pain--it really is a matter of your perception, of your intention and attitude.

Why are we not accepting, at birth, that we are worthy.  We should be able to rest in that we will have water to drink and food to eat. That we are valuable and possess a certain skill, an individual purpose that is exceptional in its uniqueness. Instead, we flail around for a couple decades, learning all our lessons of humanity that are constantly offered to you on a silver platter by those a few more decades ahead of you that we generally shun in the name of personal experience. And so many of us never get out. So many of us have battles to fight that are so much larger than any of this--abuse, violence, starvation, at least, when they are personally experienced they create a hell-hole of brain patterning that takes an incredible amount of focus and drive to pull oneself out of.

But we see it, everyday. I see it, in myself, everyday. I recognize my strength and admire my insanity. I truly believe that if each one of us, if every person who read this article, starting behaving in a manner where they would acertain to me that their mind and body and heart were engaged, fully, all the time, toward the effort of betterment of the world, in every direction--ecologically, economically, emotionally, physcially---i believe the ripples would spread and the laughter could be heard from the moon. 

We have a responsibility to remember. We have a duty to tune in, to pay attention and to recognize, to evolve within ourselves and create lasting changes that set the world up for greater success. 

I do not want to ruin this planet with sadness, fear and pain. It is an overwhelmingly exquisite place well worth the effort of preservation.