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？