Today, I Stand Still (and I ask, “Who are you?”)

I was wondering if just sitting still would be the highest moral ideal to strive for.

For the most part, all our human activity and busyness is actually just making things worse for the planet – requiring more food, fuel, production, and creating more waste. And so, a high moral ideal may be to sit still and do nothing all day.

We all assume that a hard worker is valuable, but perhaps just as valuable would be the one who did nothing.

It seems that everywhere we turn, we are being urged to do more, accomplish more, sell more of our own widgets, and buy more of other people’s widgets - of course, this relates to The Busy, Entertained, Exhausted Cycle that many of us get caught up in. The fear that strikes us deep inside is that we must operate at the highest level of efficiency and productivity, or we may someday learn that the widgets we helped create have a higher net worth than we do.

Actually, when we reach an artificial intelligence higher than our own, then it is logical that we will have produced something with a higher value than ourselves. Imagine when we have an artificially intelligent machine that can build improvements upon itself, and then that one creates new improvements, and so on.

Is our destiny to render ourselves obsolete?

Speaking of value….

What is the value of your home? Not in dollars, but lives.

Our homes are worth too much, to where the bank will happily take it from us when we cannot pay. The home is worth more than the lives inside, it seems. Out of the house, out to the street if you cannot pay. Wherever you go, no one knows, no one cares. Stripped of a home, then of humanity and dignity. This is the fear that drives us to do what the boss says, whatever it is, no matter how backward or senseless – we do it and live to be human another day. That is the hope – to cling to the empty shell of our human selves, just one more day, and hopefully, everything will turn out okay. The prior sentence is written from the perspective of what someone may feel when they have been worked to the bone, only with the mere hope of keeping their home.

It’s quite a downfall to do what is expected of you, just not quite as efficiently as a well-oiled, artificially intelligent machine, and then to find yourself without a home.

Sometimes…….

I want to clear my mind and pretend for a moment as if every message that came my way during the day was actually just a trivial bit of nonsense. I want to pretend as if everything everyone said were a virus that had been repeated ad nauseam out of habit and not for any reality of the content itself. That way, I can comfort myself that everyone has just been repeating silly little lies, and there was no reason to waste any of my brain space on it. If I could ignore it, then maybe I could focus on figuring out what actually mattered on my own. Then I ask – but is this pretend, or is this actually true? Am I just pretending that things are as they actually are?

I’m a writer, and my books are in paperback, and I wonder, am I just contributing to more dead trees out there? Could some animals have lived and sheltered inside the trees that ended up becoming my books? Will the knowledge in my books be worth more somehow than these trees? Is it possible for something to be worth more dead than alive?

When I pump my gas, sometimes I imagine that I am pumping my tank full of dead and decomposed and liquified dinosaurs. And then I think, maybe that is our fate too, for some distant alien civilization to find us in time and to use our remains to fuel their spaceships. (By the way, even though I imagine dinosaurs, actually the fuel is made up of other plants and lifeforms from before the ages of dinosaurs.)

I have meandered, but here is the Thought I started the post with: I was wondering if just sitting still would be the highest moral ideal to strive for.

I thought perhaps I would take the high road today and sit still. And then I realized this is what I do every day, since writing and managing my business is mostly done sitting down and with stillness. And doing the same thing we do every day in habitual fashion couldn’t possibly be the highest moral ideal, could it?

So rather than sit, today I am going to stand and meditate in stillness.

Today, do something still, even if it’s just for five minutes. Then ask yourself, is this going to make things better or worse for all of humanity? Then ask yourself, what would happen if all humans sat or stood still for a full 24 hour day? Would we go mad, or sane, or both?

In stillness, perhaps we can let go of some of the insanity of our ways, and just for a moment perceive the actual truth as it is.

In our stillness and lack of productivity, would the world notice that we hadn’t helped produce a new widget? Would the world starve more because of our personal absence from it, or more from the absence of our widgets?

When we meet someone new, we often ask what they do, not who they are. Is that because we all know the widgets that we make (e.g., I make books, or at least the writing inside them), but few of us truly know ourselves or our own value independent from what we are making?

I once had a great fear that a stranger would one day ask me, “Who are you?” and I would stumble and blabber like a drunken fool, spewing incoherent syllables that led me nowhere, and the stranger would laugh and walk away.

Do any of us really know who we are?

As we approach the new year, imagine that a stranger has walked up to you and asked, “Who are you,” with a smug grin. He seems to know that you couldn’t possibly produce a worthy response, despite all your travels, book learning, friendships, and widget-making. How do you respond?

WHO ARE YOU?

¿QUIÉN ES USTED?

QUI ÊTES-VOUS ?

QUEM É VOCÊ?

CHI SEI?

КТО ТЫ?

你是谁？

The Qualities That Make Us Who We Are

Last night as I was falling asleep, I had the Thought:

Who am I if you strip everything away? Let’s take away the people I know, the experiences I’ve had, the things I’ve learned, even my sensory abilities, my personality, biological makeup, my creative or intellectual or spiritual side. After a certain point, I become nothing. As you remove quality by quality, eventually nothing is left but nothingness itself.

Here, by qualities, I mean anything that makes you who you are.

When you lose all these pieces of who you are, eventually, what is left? It will just seem like an artificial, fragmented part of you. After a certain point, you would cease to be you.

As a peculiar example, let’s take one detail about all of us. Of course, our skin tone is a major part of how we see ourselves and others. It is probably the first or one of the first things you notice about a new person that you meet.

Consider this:

What if we all woke up tomorrow, and everyone’s skin was transparent?

You could literally see our internal organs, nerves, and maybe bones. I think people would feel more naked than ever, and they would start wearing something to cover all their exposed skin, at least what the clothing did not cover. Or they may cover it with makeup to give themselves an artificial skin tone. Otherwise, this would be too much of a distraction for most of us to bear. It would be difficult to hold a conversation with someone while you can literally see their brain. Or you may look at someone’s hands and see nerves and even bones, which could be off-putting, of course.

Yet, in a sense, nothing has really changed. We would still be the same people we always were. Our organs have always been there, they haven’t moved. But somehow, actually seeing them there would change our perceptions, our behaviors, perhaps even our beliefs.

The book Blindness by José Saramago left an impression on me when I read it many years ago - as this is a thought-provoking novel. The premise is that people spontaneously begin to go blind due to some unexplained circumstance or illness. Obviously, our sight is a pretty major quality that we value in ourselves. It is the main sense that we use to understand the world, at least for those born with sight. The book is a pretty good example of how losing one quality on a mass scale would change everything.

I have just been left amazed at the thought that if one seemingly trivial detail changes about us, then everything can change. And if one small thing changes, we may feel like we are no longer who we used to be. If my skin suddenly went transparent, or if I suddenly went blind, I think my whole life would change, and I would probably change as a person due to new experiences that would arise from this. People would treat me differently, and I would begin to shift my behaviors and expectations about life. Surely some core part of me would remain the same, but I think it’s easy to underestimate just how profoundly a life must change if we lose a major sense or quality such as sight.

So I wonder, are we just the qualities that happen to make us up? And then, if those qualities can arbitrarily change without our desire, what does that mean for us? Does it mean that our identities are sort of arbitrary outputs based on the qualities we have been given (through DNA and our experiences, etc.)

As an example, if you love rock and roll, it may just be because your Dad introduced it to you when you were a kid. If he had introduced jazz to you at that age, you might have fallen in love with that instead. Maybe if he had introduced magic tricks to you then, you would have loved that. It may have just been a point in your life when you idolized your Dad and wanted to do the same things as him. In this light, some of your qualities may be arbitrary.

These sorts of thoughts have made me wonder about the level of influence or power we truly have over our lives. One minuscule quality can change everything. And many of those qualities that we adopt are based on our environment and circumstances. It seems like we don’t have much choice in the qualities that make us up, right?

However, we may have much more power than we think. For example, if James (fictitious person) works hard to develop himself, he may gain better communication skills, self-confidence, resilience, and stress-reduction techniques. These simple qualities may work to change his whole life. Rather than waiting for life to influence his qualities, he has taken it upon himself to develop into something better.

In fact, to go back to the idea that one simple quality can change everything, perhaps by working on his communication skills first, he was able to gain self-confidence. Then this helped him gain the energy and motivation to improve himself in numerous other ways. One quality, his communication skills, could have made all the difference. And if he never developed that skill, his whole life path may have gone in a different, much worse path for him.

To sum up, in this post, there are just a few key ideas for you to think about:

1.     Who are we really? By removing or adding a seemingly trivial quality in our lives, everything about us can change. Is your identity something that you will actively shape yourself, or is it mostly being done by your environment and surroundings? What part of yourself do you identify with the most? Is this something that you chose, or something that happened to you?

2.     If one simple quality can change everything, you should choose to develop key qualities in yourself that can greatly impact your life. For example, this may be self-confidence, communication skills, resilience, creative skills, memory, attention, or mindfulness. You may wish to learn how to train yourself mentally to improve some of these qualities. The skills or qualities that can make the greatest impact may be different for everyone. You should ask yourself which quality would help you accomplish your life’s mission or key goals.