The key to bringing about anarchy, order, love and freedom ... is YOU.
Bending over backwards at great, great heights to build a rickety wooden tower for someone, though you know it's going to kill you when you fall. Driving off a cliff with your son in the car while being assured by everyone around you that all this is normal, and to be expected.
I've been having dreams about falling, and losing my balance in past weeks. It's clear my mind is telling me something. And the message seems pretty direct:
You are bending over backwards and risking your very essence, and connection with things and people you love dearly, for a world that doesn't understand you, and that is obsessed with telling you that to do so is normal. It's not.
Imitation Is Suicide
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
Who you are is never going to be the same as who anyone else is.
As excruciatingly painful as this truth can be at times, it remains. You are unique. Unrepeatable. Completely alone in this world, in a very real sense. And though this assessment may sound bleak, be of good cheer. This solitude is your greatest strength — if you use it.
All my dreams of falling and endangering my son as of late reflect a pressure I've been feeling more and more in my life — the pressure to conform.
To be sure, this force is always and has always been around. But now, with the mask madness growing, crown virus hysteria rising beyond fever pitch, and a new job that requires me to work back-to-back 12-hour days at times, while suppressing my own opinions, I feel the weight of unnatural expectations bearing down anew.
Are you serving yourself — the anarchist — or a second-rate master?
We've all got to put up with some amount of suffering and pain to survive, and to reach our goals. To learn. To grow. To develop a gentle, strong, level-headed, good humored and seasoned character. But what about suffering that is without honor or benefit?
The suffering of just going along to get along, and stifling completely your true voice, to fit in?
Living here in Japan this is all too common. Suicide rates are high precisely because there is no outlet — or most Japanese feel there isn't — for raw self-expression when life is shit. To speak out about some injustice or struggle is to show weakness, and to rock the boat of the all-important "social harmony."
To admit suffering from depression is usually to be socially ostracized. To suggest a new way of living to be viewed as the tallest blade of grass, begging to be cut down by the fear-fueled status quo.
Of course this is the same to some degree everywhere. How to escape? Well, we can never escape this without you. The world needs your anarchy.
By "your anarchy," or "my anarchy," I mean that childlike part of us that is not yet corrupted by the world of authoritarian violence and brainwash. The original little voice and genius living inside of us all. Your anarchy, then, is your happiness. Whatever happens, whatever happenstance brings, you and you alone steer your ship.
How can anyone learn of freedom, or find release from the prison, if we don't let them know we are also on that path, and share with them the answers we have found?
To loan out the helm of our fortune to any captain other than ourselves, is to risk not only destruction, but to hide the treasure of our unique being and perspective from others. Other individuals who may despereately desire to connect to something real in this fake and violent paradigm.
Never Surrender
We may not "win." And we may not succeed in steering our ships against the violent winds and crashing waves of fortune. We may have to take some painful hits of compromise here and there until our chance arrives to fight when the enemy crosses our line, or dash out the door into something better.
One thing is certain: to continue indefinitely in something — a job, relationship, habit or belief — that insults your spirit, mocks your human dignity, or, most tragically, stifles your unique voice, your anarchy — is to rob yourself and the world of a treasure that can never be replaced, or repeated.
The gift of you. The gift of me. The true gift of authentic society.
Connection.
-GWS
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