A Healthy Attitude

The most defining attribute of a “healthy” person is their attitude -- about their own lives, specifically and directly. That leads them to regard every challenge and difficulty, as simply the work they have to get focused to do -- and not that all the irrelevancies of their lives and habits, are more important.

Many do not have the time and energy to solve the urgencies and immediacies because they are involved in the rituals of their daily living -- failing to understand that these rituals were designed to aid them and not prevent them from being effective in the real matters that actually count.

Chief is this flexibility and willingness to overcome one’s habits and conditioning and embrace the new. Such people have convinced themselves that there is nothing new -- and in fact, the world is the same world it was a thousand years ago, or for that matter, even ten, and with great changes and advances, even a year could be an entirely different world. But what really changes, are individuals and their responses. Some do it sooner than others -- while many, will be the last to know, as well as the most resistant to acknowledging that things and times have changed -- because they think it is their responsibility to defend and perpetuate the status quo.

These are the “bureaucrats” of life -- who show up each day and keep the system running as it is -- as their job and “duty.” The entrepreneurs of life, are those questioning everything -- including whether it is necessary to go on doing things as we always have done before. They become the innovators and advocates for change -- by living it; the former’s idea of change, is to demand that everybody else change before they do, or will.

And so during those times of notable and pervasive changes, a few start to come out on the “other side,” while many more are still contemplating whether to make the leap. These changes may accompany symbolic political changes but are actually much larger cultural and social changes that the political changes must also reflect.

The protest movements are largely symbolic of the resistance to change -- rather than an expression of it, because it is just against the prevailing the positive forces, and offer no viable alternative “actions.” The opposite of anything, is simply the original thing itself -- creating its own internal energy. Real change is that energy and time being refocused on the new -- in entirely positive and productive ways.

For that to happen, very obviously, symbolic (political) changes will take place, but it is just the metaphor for the much more pervasive changes taking place.

A dominant theme of these times is the movement away from “becoming” to actual “being,” as many more, no longer contemplate their strategies for the future, but are now in the process of living out those realities. That is the face of the present disruption that is the current recession -- or economic discontinuity -- when people do not continue as they recently have, but change in a very fundamental way.

And that is largely this shifting of attention from the future to the present, just as the previous generation, shifted the focus from the past to the future -- but both the past and the future, is not the urgency, immediacy and reality that the present is.

This change is entirely positive because it means people find out in their own realities and experience what the truth is -- and not as in past times, are told what that truth is, and then merely pass it on to others, depending on their place in the pecking order and status quo. Thus, many of those with central roles in the old world, are aghast and disturbed by the new -- even as much as they like to insist and perceive themselves as the “progressive” elements of society, when clearly, by their actions, they are the rearguard defense for all that is dying and no longer true.

The healthy mind and attitude, are those capable of letting go of both the ideologies of the past and future, and discovering the truth of life as it actually unfolds -- without the preconceived and limiting ideas of what they “know” for a fact, but have never inquired deeply for themselves. They simply repeat the “truth” somebody else imposed upon them.

The freedom from that manner of conditioning and living, is the healthy mind and attitude that characterizes and summarizes “health” in these times.