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December 10, 2013

Why change is good

I and others just keep on living with the momentum of high school, college and graduate school behind us, accepting the decently-paid jobs that come our way to solve problems we're trained for, but don't necessarily question.

It's when we start questioning the problems themselves that the reasoning starts to falter. Why do we practice law and sell real estate and go to a 9-5 the way we do? Why are we such avid consumers and upholders of individual freedom? So much of it is cultural conditioning that we become self-aware of when we travel to another country, sometimes another state. It becomes clear that norms can be very different and we're surprised by the strange nature of other cultures. What a self-aggrandizing idea! I bet people visiting from other cultures have exactly the same reaction. So there's another layer to combat, the inherent ethnocentrism that emerges when we encounter not just different looking people, but a whole another set of rules we're not prepared for. It's like going through the 5 stages of grief, first there's denial and then anger and eventually we evolve to acceptance. We get the travel bug, spurred by not just wanderlust or a desire to escape, but to be renewed by our surroundings.

What if we could be renewed within our own cultural context? Major change usually occurs when we change our environment or our thinking. Travel ushers the former, but what creates the possibility for the latter? Self-awareness doesn't happen in a vacuum. We often think of meditation as an escape within ourselves, when it is in fact exactly the opposite, it is complete awareness of our present moment. That means we hear, see, smell and accept everything around us as it is. It's almost a hyper-sensitivity to our natural and unnatural surroundings.

The awareness of nature in itself is fascinating, because it can be very limited in an urban environment, but all of a sudden you see a beautiful tree swaying in front of your apartment building that you completely missed! Or you'll be walking in a hurry to a meeting and be stopped by pigeons doing some kind of mating dance in front of you. It's surprising that you could have missed it lost in your thoughts about what you're going to say, do, and think in your next face-to-face.

Nature is constant movement. Trees are never as static as they may seem. Life is happening around us, just asking us to witness it. It makes sense that our awareness sees that movement when we work simply to build up our senses.

What's even more fascinating is how aware we become of our unnatural surroundings, or rather the cultural mores that condition our minds daily to guide our thinking one way or another. If we're truly paying attention in the moment, we can immediately see the effect an advertisement has on us, its repetitive nature seeping into us hoping we'll think of the brand when we go to the store. We start noticing people's ticks and responses and our ticks and responses to other people. We hear the news differently, the intonations that exaggerate and polarize. We notice art in a way we never saw it before, seeing the incontrovertible evidence of the artist's life experience and emotion and reaction to the world embedded within a simple painting. We start seeing through things, not needing the environmental shift to notice how we live and why we live. The acknowledgement of our unnatural surroundings also becomes a constant as we shift to an instantaneous mental acuity of where we are and why we are.

How will we change otherwise?