Searching For Appreciation

Do you ever wake up on one of "those" days and find it hard to find anything to appreciate in your life?

I know that deliberately looking for things to praise or enjoy in life is the path back to positivity when doubt or fear take hold of me, and yet isn't there also some kind of perverse enjoyment in being negative?  Even if you don't give up, why does thinking about giving up feel so damn good sometimes? 

Why are we driving so fast towards that obvious cliff?

In my mid-20s, when I was well into my first real metaphysical crises, I had an epiphany that omniscience wasn't what I was seeking, i.e. the meaning of being human was not about achieving some all-knowing state of being like Jesus or Buddha while still residing in human form, e.g. God on Earth. 

The meaning of being human was being human, living in the now, manifesting the set of molecules you are as the best possible molecules in this moment.  If their was a God's power to come, it would come naturally out of the structure of faith and use. 

I knew in my heart that if we each could achieve Jesus-like powers, they only came through joy and love, not hate or divisiveness, and especially not the restrictive judgments and condemnations the keepers of his faith now mostly practiced.  I flourished under this epiphany for years.

Yet I still had bad days, and increasingly, I felt guilty for them, making them worse.  I compounded my bad days because I used the temporary negativity as a kind of bulldozer on the house-of-cards that is my self-esteem.  Then I acted without self-esteem to hurt myself or those I loved.

But why is my self-esteem so fragile? Why are these cycles repeated so?  Why are the most important parts of me, the part of me that relates to me, made out of such flimsy materials instead of something more akin to the primal element from which we all have sprung?

Why, indeed.

In my late 30s, stuck in another kind of metaphysical crisis, I find myself worrying about the environment, the Earth and all of the children now being born into a world facing such challenges of population, resources and pollution.  My worry doesn't help the situation, and I know that, so I try to stop it. 

Still the siren's song of capitalism's endgame calls: consume to live, exploit to thrive, justify to bask in disproportionate reward perpetuated with vanity ad-nauseum on every network, every station, every level of the ever-shorter, ever-more-important, ever-less meaningful current multimedia obsession.

Cash is king, whether I like it or not, and actually, I don't like it at all.

Searching for appreciation in my own perspective, I hide in the metaphysical closet from our monstrous future as it stomps up and down the hall outside.  It's ominous portent scares me, threatening my peace, making positivity that much harder to achieve and sustain, yet that much more needed.   

Can any of us live and not face it somehow?

Having enough of hiding, I open the door to confront the monster, but it is gone.  Relieved, yet disappointed too, I realize our confrontation with humanity's karmic checkbook is put off another day. 

We have another day to solve our problems, another day to find esteem through work, another day to cherish each other's company.

I appreciate that.

Comments

[bgk]

These thoughts have raced through my brain for the past couple of years, in both slow and fast half thought and fully formed ideas.

The struggle of this inquiry is what does it al mean. How do we anticipate the calling of our collective Karmic tab? How do we pay for our individual share of the tab? How do we help our friends by paying for their Karmic drinks?

We've lit the fear here. Now the question remains, what do we do with this illuminated Sword of Damoclese?

While part of the answer may be in the "Green Movement": structures need to be changed vs spring cleaned. Can we remove ourselves from the industry-consumption model without sacrificing our lifestyle? --Hence the quandry.