The Status Quo

What drives man to always be looking beyond the next horizon for that ultimate attainment of fulfillment, while others, at the same time, are satisfied enough with the current now? Is it the "some day" principle? Some day I will make a million dollars and THEN I will be happy. Some day I will finally drop those few pounds and THEN I will be content. Some day I will travel to far off places and mingle with the cultures of the world and THEN I will be satisfied.

At one end of the spectrum we have the type (yes I am stereotyping, get over it already) of people who gravitate to the path of least resistance. These folks are what make up the majority of people we come in contact with on a daily basis. Their life is their life and they are purposely, albeit aimlessly drifting toward deterministic, reactionary, imposed life situations. Their daily choices revolve around the concept of how best to react to any given situation. There are a lot of "what if" questions asked by this group. What if such and such happens, what will I do? Or, what if so and so asks me this, what will I say? This group is wary and even at times stressed by the unknown factors in life.

On the other side of the fence are the adventurers, the trailblazers, and free spirits of the world. Rather than always wondering what hand life will deal them, they make their own deck, shuffle it and deal themselves a hand. If they don't like it, they do it again until they see something they like. While this lifestyle seems to be more exciting and even more proactive, it also has its hangups and pitfalls. There is much more of the unknown with this approach, but that is part of what drives the individual to succeed.

While it is likely improbable to ally yourself to any one of these ideals exclusively, I would tend to think those who favor the latter ideal more heavily, would experience higher highs and lower lows. Their expectation in most situations would almost always exceed that of the result, but that driving desire would bring you a greater satisfaction when you look back on your life accomplishments. Those that follow the status quo and live a more mundane and safe existence would feel a greater sense of satisfaction in the moment, but would look back with regret on what could have been, rather than what was.

Both approaches have merit to be sure, and for any given situation, one ideal might be a better choice, but for me, I will try and push myself and those around me to attain a higher station, a grander vista of life as it were.

Kindness

I am often taken back by the varying degrees of empathetical effort expended by those around me in regard to the feelings of others. Most of my life I have been a very off-the-cuff kind of a person. I say what I mean and mean what I say. Rarely do I hold back my opinions and views, and this of course has most adequately labeled me as a heavily voiced, intimidating, and even overbearing individual.

Introspectively, I do care about others and even value their views. I know how fooled our emotions can become in situations and thusly, almost unconsciously at times, negate to value emotions and the feelings of others in my day to day communication. If I were to pick one thing about myself I would change, it would have to include the kindness which I extend to those around me. The saying "kill them with kindness", rings truer and truer to me the older I get.

Maybe kindness is a trait gained over time rather than just having it part of our nature. Most people (myself included) are selfish buggers, and as such, we tend to ignore the sphere outside our personal sphere whenever possible it seems. Having children and being a parent of course tends to root this from our breasts like some plague that needs slaying. You cannot afford to be as selfish after you have children (at least and have any hope of being a good parent, with children that have been taught correctly and will, at some date in the future, start to contribute to society more than just eating, sleeping, and defecating).

So, how does one gain the attribute or characteristic of kindness? What truly is kindness? Why should we or should we not be kind?

A simplistic definition of kindness could be summed up by stating, "Kindness is having the ability to put the needs/emotional well-being/ego/self-esteem of someone else above that of our own, and choosing to do so freely without any compulsory means."

I would venture to claim that most people desire to attain a level of kindness far greater than they now possess, and furthermore, I would also venture to claim that the only way kindness can be achieved is in the doing of kind things. This brings us to service. Service is when we give something of ourselves, whether it is time, money, possessions, or talents, to someone else with no known or desired benefit. This is the highest form of kindness in my view.

When we remove the shackles which accompany the mindset of "What do I get from this?", then we are able to see things outside of ourselves and like my post below, we become objective in our actions, emotions, feelings, and attitude.

The world experiences constant change, and along with that change, there are myriads of people who if they chose to become objective and kind, you would see a lot less suffering, war, poverty, and mankind would achieve a higher level of excellence than we have yet to achieve.

I cannot ever think of a time when kindness is not appropriate. Whether you are talking with a friend, sibling, parent, child, co-worker, relative, or a perfect stranger, it would become us all to step back for just a moment, and ponder on the impact to the person who we are experiencing this moment with and consider their feelings. That very act alone would propel us away from our selfish nature.

Kindness is a choice, it begins with each person and it can either be propagated or destroyed by one single person in any given situation. Let each of us choose the better part by deciding right now to be more kind. You never know, it might just come back tenfold.

Objectivity vs. Subjectivity

In life I find it is far easier to live with blinders on so-to-speak, rather than see the world around you for what it is, what it can be, and even for what it should be.

We as humans tend to live our lives in a bubble, and in that bubble we get comfortable, satisfied, lazy and over time heavily resistant to change. Although we know that nothing in this life is constant except that everything changes, we still insist on trying our hardest to keep our security blanket wrapped tightly around us in a vain effort to stop the ebbing tide of change.

Why do we do this? We are a somewhat intelligent race, maybe not in a general sense, but of course in specific cases we feel superior to the beasts of the field, fishes in the seas, and birds of the sky. Can we not see the foolishness in our fruitless efforts to remain changeless?

This leads me to ponder that of subjective viewpoints and the merit (if any) they provide versus the elusive (to most) objectivity that allows us to see outside of ourselves and our limited, egotistical and often times selfish nature.

Does subjectivity yield anything other than gaining a semblance of comfort and security by latching on to traditions, emotions, notions, and sometimes time honored views? In almost all cases that I can think of, subjectivity hurts more than helps. It burdens us with preconceived notions rather than empirical, extrinsic evidence to support our views.

There are rare cases when that "gut" feeling we have all experienced, tends to overshadow (most of the time rightly so) that which we are pining on about and helps to hurtle us in the right direction. In these cases subjectivity I would argue is the exception to the rule, and is of more value that objectivity.

Moving forward, if we look at objectivity, we can actually step outside the boundaries of our limited understanding and experience, thus, not being ruled by emotion, or previous experience empowers us to make a more non-human choice. After all, we are by nature, creatures of habit, and passion(s). I would argue that to truly see objectively and choose according to that new found sight, empowers us to gain characteristics of a being greater than ourselves. This is personal growth at its finest. We are able to remove the shackles of choice by natural selection (deterministic choice), and move to a free-will based choice by means of adaptation.

Now, we are often challenged in our views, opinions and feelings. But this does not mean, this is a bad thing. This merely means that we are being given an opportunity to determine if our previous course of action was objectively sought out, or whether we let emotions rule the day.

Ideally the time spent determining, shortcuts as we become more efficient in our objective deliberation; most of the time we spend worrying about things usually deals with the heart and not the head.

All in all, when challenged, we need embrace the exploratory means in which we can absolve ourselves of subjectivity. Excepting of course the times when the "gut" feeling is played as a trump card.

Children, because of their ignorance, almost always choose the subjective path, due to limited knowledge, understanding, experience, time, patience, faculties, deductive reasoning skills and a myriad of other things. As we grow older these pretentious tendencies need to be left behind and objective rationale should be our weapon of choice.

Ours is not ultimately the struggle of bad or good choices, but that of good, better and best choices. Even a simple mule knows not to act like a fool and make a moronic choice, but the separation of man and animal (at least from my viewpoint) is mans ability to choose better than yesterday and tomorrow better than before. Not from subjective, emotionally response mechanics, but from a very real, objective, outside looking, selfless motivation in which will enoble us and eventually will align ourselves with a greater divine than we now possess.