In our times
It is incredible to imagine all the knowledge acquired and how comfortable life has become for many of us. It’s already true thinking 20 years back and almost unimaginably true imagining 100 years ago.
This evolution is a fact.
But it may not be the perception we are dealing with.
Thinking about it the power of everything the generations before us developed and put at our disposal becomes visible as a strength and as a weakness.
It is so much knowledge that it has become overwhelming. It is so comfortable that dealing with overwhelm seems to be optional.
But life creeps in. And it is the life that is at our disposal now.
The quest for satisfaction and happiness becomes apparent. We’ve been invited to seek happiness, search for well-being, organize work-life balance, etc. For many, it is the very moment in which they realize how much there is to learn and how miserable they feel. Experiencing overwhelm reconnects us with the senses of being lost, struggling, and in need of help. It is a situation in which the strength, that is the availability of knowledge and comfort at our fingertips can transform itself into its weakness.
Knowledge made many of the life skills available to us stand out.
Being grateful, being vulnerable, learning, strategizing, prioritizing, caretaking, etc. became skills to develop. They seem to be skills to learn on top of the daily tasks, and objectives to attain. Seeing the need for such skills they’ve been integrated into the daily tasks making the latter more and more complicated.
It is as if one would try to deal with life as something complicated that can be shaped into something specific.
But life is complex.
There is no clear cause-and-effect relationship between the life we have now and the one we’ll live in 10 years.
Trying to address the complex as if it were complicated doesn’t work. It leads to a dynamic of transforming strength into weakness. It leads to trying to do everything well, to seeking to learn all the skills independently from one another.
It is misunderstanding the role of such skills. They are part of a whole and offer access to the system we are dealing with.
If one wants to focus on one skill, the most important will be the ability to remain present to the moment. It makes awareness accessible and becomes a starting point to discover the system that represents our life. Awareness enables experience in the moment, and it is in experience that many of the life skills named find their root. It is where our ability to experience the moment can transform what is not known into what is known.
The toddler who stands up for the first time experiences what it means to stand. Usually only for a very short moment and it takes him a lot of effort to experience it a second time. As he practices, he starts to learn the nuances of what it is to be standing. The same is true for gratitude, vulnerability, reciprocity, and other life skills. It happens on the go – if we are able to become aware and experience them.
We’ll already know some of them in and out, but others are among the experiences we don’t know we know.
It takes time to notice them and happens at our own rhythm. Sometimes through the help of others who see and can name our experience. Sometimes through the help of others who reject us blaming us for our lack of our lack of awareness.
Once the experience becomes recognizable it becomes possible to expand on it situation by situation.
