Don’t feel stifled in ‘responsible’ lifestyle. Let flower child surface in you !
“Your time is limited. Don’t spend it living someone else’s life” - Steve Jobs
Work, family responsibilities, social norms and rules – all are designed to make our life orderly, smooth and risk free. A guided life in a way! Such life makes me a ‘normal’ and respected person.
“This is how it is done – this is how it has been done for hundreds of years. Doing it this way will make you happy …” says everyone around me. All true – provided that I accept the ‘standard’ definition of ‘happiness’. What if my definition of ‘happiness’ is different? What if I want to grow in a manner which is free, wild and beautiful in a unobtrusive manner ?
These lovely flowers, growing with abundance near my home somehow triggered the thoughts of free spirit and the thoughts of a Chinese trader I met in Chengdu in 2014 about 'free spirit'. However, more about that later. First, let us take a moment to enjoy the beauty of the flowers… Here is the Hi-res image, which I captured on my Nikon P900.
Since I have stepped back from my so called 'successful career' a bit to let my wild side surface, after spending many years as a globetrotting Executive, I have started to notice my own spirit and my freedom a bit. This is a loose summary of my thoughts on the subject...
For those of us born after the happening decades of 1960-70, this may be an unfamiliar term. Know more popularly as ‘hippies’, masses of people around the world joined what was termed a 'movement', almost a cult.
What it was, apparently, is that people adopted a lifestyle - rejecting conventional society and advocating love, peace, and simple, idealistic values.
The origin of the term ‘flower child or flower children’ traces back to the origin of the movement when It was the custom of "flower children" to wear and distribute flowers or floral-themed decorations to symbolize ideals of universal belonging, peace, and love. The term was picked up by media thereafter and was applied to the hippie movement, in general.
Let us get the question above answered first and out of the way. Who wants to be associated with the term ‘hippie’ these days? “That was so 1960s!” many of us may say. Many of us may apply cliche jargon and deplore them.
Perhaps, it is true that the flower children did, kind of, become a cliche representation, with the ubiquitous Volkswagen Camper that became their home and the habits they became of role model for, in the media.
Unfortunately, the images implanted in the mind of people in the world about the flower children carry a lot of negatives. They mean different things to different classes of people. Most of these things are perhaps biased views, perspectives formed based on a few bad eggs or are they really representative of the flower children? I really do not know. I find the following extract from this source covers some of the aspects of how they were viewed in general:
To atheists and people that pride themselves on being rational, scientific types, hippies are disturbingly prone to "woo" - Eastern religion, Jesus freakery, human potential cultishness, paganism, and pseudoscience.
To punks, hippies are just, well, hippies.
To conservatives, hippies were the major instigators of a breach between a sort of bygone Christian Spartan ideal America and today's sub-Roman Empire debauchery.
To liberals, hippies are an unpleasant reminder of the stew of Vietnam, civil rights, and protesting factions that tripped up Johnson, RFK, Humphrey, and Muskie, and led to the futile McGovern nomination.
To hard-working professionals and domesticated family types, hippies are a reminder of the compromises most of us end up making as we age.
To poor people and people of color, hippies are a symbol of privilege.
To culture vultures, particularly music fans, hippies are a mixed bag - for every inspired flight of fancy, there seems to be a corresponding pit of self-indulgence.
Again - I personally do not know enough about the movement in general to be able to decipher all these perspectives and say whether they are right or wrong.
However, I do know one thing, based on the things pointed out by this Chinese Hippie I met - there are things about the movement that we must view in a very positive light and sift the golden nuggets from everything that was the gravel of bad things.
Being in an orderly, routine and controlled life style is great but every moment we spend in such a lifestyle slowly kills our creativity and spirit. We need to let the ‘inner self’, trapped within us to enjoy a few moments of fresh air, a breath of life you may call it, once in a while. Awareness of the need of the spirit to be free is sufficient sometimes.
There is no need for us to go full blown ‘hippie’ and abandon our current lifestyle. We can, rather, induce the following aspects of being a flower child in our daily lives in a controlled manner:
- Let music touch our soul. Upbeat, positive and perhaps off-track music – anything that touches us
- Love nature. It does not cost money. All it takes is awareness
- Love adventure. This does not mean we need to climb Mount Everest. Perhaps we can climb a local hillock and enjoying the view? Not difficult – is it ?
- Stand up for our beliefs. Call a spade a spade. Walk the talk! Talk the walk!
- Be unique. Live our own life. Imitating a good thing is not necessarily bad but perhaps you can do better?
- Make our own style. Fashion is just another name for uniforms created for the multitudes by those millionaires who decide what everyone should wear. ‘Orange is the new black’ my A$$! I will wear Orange when I want to look like a Halloween pumpkin!
These small things will light up our lives in a way we cannot even imagine.
In conclusion:
“Promise to stay wild with me. We'll seek and return and stay to find beauty and the extraordinary in all the spaces we can claim. We'll know how to live. How to breathe magic into the mundane."― Victoria Erickson
Steemians, please share your experiences and views on the subject. It will be great to get more perspective and a lively dialogue going. Thanks
Note: All images except for the wildlife photo and the title image created by me are from pixabay.com
Also, if you are wondering about the chinese script and #cn tag - interestingly enough, the 'free spirit' concept and the positives of a flower child were brought to my notice couple of years ago by a Chinese hippie gentleman I met in Chengdu. This is just my way of paying a tribute to him.