Rooted in Everything
Do you ever feel separate from the rest of the world? Like there’s you, the world of man, and nature?
A lot of us feel like we sit apart from the natural order of things, but this is merely an illusion. A concept. An idea. We are as much a part of everything as anything else.
Nature has never excluded us. How could we be excluded from something we are literally contained within? Something we and all of our creations are the product of? The natural order pervades home, office, phone, and food. We are still enveloped in the natural order: its give and take, push and pull, ebb and flow.
In securing our safety, we have stripped ourselves of experience.
With an endless supply of entertainment, we have desensitized ourselves to its stimulation.
Through social networks capable of connecting anyone at any time, we have become increasingly disassociated, with fewer real connections than ever.
Feeding more people than throughout all of history, we have enabled a form of crop production that is slowly poisoning us all.
For nearly every pharmaceutical solution, there are unhealthy side effects, while the healthiest solution requires suffering through the work to get there.
With the bounty of information at your fingertips, you might only become more deluded, lost in the fiction of concepts.
To choose any artificial experience, we trade time away from organic, spontaneous experience.
The natural order, orders all. You can’t escape it, but you can embrace it.
If for every addition there is a subtraction, it is simply a matter of where you want to land on the continuum. That first requires recognizing the continuum.
If I eat only for pleasure, I will certainly get sick. If I eat sometimes for pleasure, I will likely deal with some form of disease sometime in my later years. If I eat only to nourish my body, my body will perform better than it could otherwise.
If I only consume the media I want to, I will grow psychologically unwell. I will lack nuance, resilience, and presence. If I consume both those things which challenge me to grow and those things which entertain me, I can struggle toward the heights or struggle against the depths. If I dedicate myself to purity and growth, I will be the light in Plato’s cave; no one will know me fully, but light is all that differentiates shadow.
You can settle in unintentionally, never seeing the continuum for what it is, never realizing you can’t avoid the natural order, or you can plant yourself accordingly, sowing the seeds to grow productively.
Where do you want to plant yourself?
