This is Not a Showdown

One of my favorite poets, slam poets, spoken word artists, is Buddy Wakefield, his words have been a comfort to me inasmuch as a guide, he has inspired me to challenge myself beyond my comfort levels and to express myself in ways that I have either never considered before or that seemed impossible, to me.

Most of us never allow ourselves the time to explore our boundaries, we don't acknowledge what we believe to be our limits, and we definitely do not dare ourselves to press them, to redefine our limits, and then to continue to shatter them. For most of us, we live content in watching or reading the stories about other people testing themselves. While we dwell in the comfort of our limits. We never challenge our religious or political ideologies, we simply argue the same points and perspectives that parents before us have and their parents before them, we associate ourselves with people who already agree with our rigid untested worldviews and we pride ourselves in our irreproachable cementitious morality, without even the audacity to force ourselves to think critically.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." ~ John F. Kennedy

I happen to see this as one of our biggest failings. And we look past it, no: we actively ignore it, and in proxy we employ the surrogates of political dissonance - we blame others, we point fingers, and when we do so from the comfort and the welfare of the privacy of our homes we inherently blame those that think differently than ourselves, because instead of constitutionally looking inwards at our own role we presuppose the ill-will of what we cannot relate to.

"This is not a showdown or a shootout, we are not facing off but I can feel the rumble between dusk and dawn as if the chance to come clean with myself will be outlawed unless I relax" ~ Buddy Wakefield

Every conversation I can recall having regarding politics and, when I refer to politics I am talking about the whole of human interaction, we are always - always - speaking as if we were in some sort of conflict, we think of life as something that we have to acquire or secure, and its apparent in everything: the way we are educated, its prevalent in our careers, our interactions, the way that we campaign and vote, how we worship but life does not need to be a conflict day-in-and-day-out, we are not here to climb over the backs of the people who might be "in our way..." there is no template for the manner in which we live our best life, or who we have to overcome in order to get there. That is all a part of the standard from which we limit ourselves, the standard in which our social infrastructure has been misshapen.

"If there was one life skill everyone on the planet needed, it was the ability to think with critical objectivity."

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such think as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat your alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million death before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness...because the really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” ~ DFW