Core: Be Brave, Practice Grace, Love Others

I find value in the assertion that every human being has something to offer; a gift to give as it were. I believe that we have great potential to do good and be good but that sometimes our environment can discourage us from that potential.

I have always sought out community oriented groups and organizations because I understood that those things enhance a person’s sense of meaning.

“You were not just born to center your entire existence on work and labor. You were born to heal, to grow, to be of service to yourself and community, to practice, to experiment, to create, to have space, to dream, and to connect.” ― Tricia Hersey

Given our present-day trend toward optimization of productivity, but minimization of the things that reinforce our sense of meaning, belonging, or indispensability, I find it incredibly important to do what I can to assist in more opportunity for the aforementioned meaning, belonging and indispensability in the community at large.

I also find valid the observation that the growing sense of human disposability either in body or in relation to other human beings magnifies the sense of despair and shrinks the sense of meaning that people might have.

This means we are all responsible to our fellow human beings to reflect on the cognitive biases we might have that would contribute to despair and damage a sense of belonging; an important element of meaning.

“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.”

― Marcel Proust

We often try to come to understanding like we use a favorite hand tool, with use, it must be sharpened, honed, and oiled, but we also need to recognize when the task at hand doesn’t call for that same tool, we need to make room in our workshop for more tools and find skill with them. I remind myself to focus on the ‘ing’ as in learning, adapting, growing, living, listening, and appreciating. That work is never done as life is ever changing.

Focus, attention, reflection, intro and extrospection are plants in a garden that should not be neglected.

Human beings as a general population have a propensity for systems blindness. We may come to deeply know one or two systems quite well because we make that our life, our world, but we tend not to look too deeply at systems that are not part of our immediate attention, even though those systems may affect us in profound ways. Instead we tend to rely on others to be the experts in those systems and sometimes those experts do not necessarily have our interests at heart. This can create problematic circumstances, especially when self-interest, integrity-protection, and disposability culture come in to play.