If You Don't Get Better, You'll Get Worse

When one is young, it seems like one gets better no matter what one does, but when one becomes old, things seem to get worse, unless one makes them get better. Life is never staying the same, no matter how much one tries to make it so. There is always change, and so the choice one can make, is whether the orientation and organizing principle of that life, is to get better, or get worse -- and if one deliberately doesn't make that effort to get better, they will surely get worse -- which is to achieve a mindless, random result -- and so the great drive in life, is this quest for improvement -- or not.

In this manner, one chooses life (growth) or death (deterioration) -- as long as one can tell the difference and make it matter, as the exercise and expression of their will (to live). Otherwise, it doesn't matter if one chooses life or death, improvement or decline, and eventually, one no longer has the power to effect that desire as the great organizing principle and experience of their lives. This fundamental, and basic orientation, is how one approaches and does everything in life -- so there is improvement, rather than at some point, a reversal that overwhelms one's life until one feels they do not have this control over the course and shape of their lives, existence, experiences and outcomes, and their only hope and recourse, is that somebody else can change that.

Increasingly, that control is claimed by some expert, professional, or politician, who promises that if one lets them do all their thinking for them, everything will work out perfectly -- which is to say, that one no longer has control over one's own life. And the whole meaning of humanity, and individual lives, is not the control of every other life, but merely one's own, and from that power, derives all other.

It is a very simple and basic lesson -- that changing the world, as one is taught is a very noble purpose, must begin with changing one's own life and immediate environment, as the world one can change -- always. If not, then changing the world one doesn't actually inhabit and effect, has no meaning but is a delusion that one is doing something other than what one actually is -- which would be to make the world worse, thinking one is making it better.

In a healthy, integrated life, there is no contradiction of thinking from doing -- but the thinking is one's doing, and not separate from it -- which are always the problem, the disease, and the struggles of the world -- to become other than what is. That is the essential problem -- and never the solution. Because when one understands what one is (doing), there is no conflict of the world in what is, and what one wants it to become otherwise, which is the nature of violence, force and aggression.

But moving with understanding of what is, and not trying to force what is not to be what is, is the denial that makes the resolution (betterment) of anything, impossible.

For this reason, any discussion must examine the understanding of the facts, and not assume they own the facts, and everybody else better "get with the program," because there is no other way. The great improvements in the human condition, is the discovery of other ways -- and not more conformity and obedience to the one way, any group of individuals or trade associations, insists is the only way that one can think about these things.