The daily diet of images portraying beautiful people with ideal lives can keep us living with a constant feeling of lack, trying to be more, do more and have more. It can cause us to compulsively strive for perfection in every part of our existence. With this bombardment, we need to be reminded just as often that nothing external can define us or make us happy. No one else can save us. We only miss out when we chase fulfillment externally and forget the one place where there is no lack…
The present moment.
Jarl and Steve
The American Dream is a frightful illusion. We expect to be able to live beyond our means, we expect to be more attractive than average, and we take for granted finding success by winning in competition, thus becoming superior people. Competition in all things has now gone so far that recently lots of people have come to see it for the dangerous and self-destructive habit it is. People are awakening fast to the American Trap.
Today’s gratitude reflects that set of illusions. I do think that our ostentatious consumerism makes it much harder to be authentic and to live as a witness. I feel blessed to live in the partly abandoned Northeast, where there is so little by way of beautiful people and material success to compare to. It helps also not to live in a city, without the excess pressure and stress.
I see People Magazine in the doctors’ offices, but I think people here can’t identify with much of that or what’s on television. It is still true, that even if it is much quieter here, we still judge ourselves by comparing with others, and that has been a hard thing for me since I was about two.
I work on awareness every day, and am grateful to see progress and grateful to live in an atmosphere far more forgiving than the apparent setting of today’s gratitude. We have only ourselves to change and cannot predict the future, but real world exponential curves all have to collapse as they outrun their own settings, and we are watching lots of these unsustainability runouts these days.
So I think that before our material culture collapses, it is also useful to learn how to get by and be happy with nothing.
Love, Larry