Life is To Die For

 

NOTE: This was a particularly tough blog to limit to a single title. 

Equally serviceable titles included:  “Nine Lives” and “Metamorphosis”.

First, here’s a germinative suggestion: Take a trip through Arlington Cemetery sometime and ponder this thought:  What these honored men and women of our armed services died for was not our freedom to Tweet and Twitter and play video games; such are only degenerative collateral by-products.  They died trying to protect our ability to become the best we could be toward the end of making the world a better place for our having had the privilege of their protection.  It’s a sobering thought that ought to put a little fire under our belts. 

That’s Consideration One.

The Second Consideration is that we can’t become “all that we can be” [i.e., what our military heroes died for] without some very large and often traumatic changes in our lives.  The caterpillar paradigm of metamorphosis into a butterfly is instructive in this regard, but we rarely take it far enough.  In human development terms, the transitions are never complete.  Unlike the caterpillar, we are a very long distance from being “fully developed” once we get through puberty – or through high school … or college, etc.  Perhaps the arthropod paradigm is a better one: Being held together by an exoskeleton, the crab or lobster has to keep breaking out of its shell and fabricating new shells as it continues to grow. 

Humans, “being only human”, conceptually limit ourselves – i.e., fail to break out of our shells – due to what we imperfectly perceive about the world.  The first “shell” we need to break is that the world doesn’t revolve around us.  It took civilization a very long time to accept the fact that the sun does not revolve around the earth.  [“It was only in 1820 that the Church allowed another astronomer, Joseph Settle, to declare the heliocentric motion of the Earth, as proposed by Copernicus over 200 years before, as fact.” (Wikipedia)].   Most of us don’t have the luxury of languishing 200 years before getting it right! 

Also important is the fact that the harder our shells become, the more difficult they are to crack.  Comfort Zone “nesting” turns out to be a formidable exoskeleton polymerizing process.

And myriad others contribute to the hardness of our shells, with or without our overt awareness or conscious consent.  Who’s contributing to the hardness of your shell?  Rush Limbaugh?  The Tea Party?  The NRA?  

The bottom line is this: To get where we’re going and to find our “rightful” place in the world, certain things inside us have to die.  We have to move beyond ignorance, beyond mistaken assumptions, beyond unrealistic expectations and beyond unfounded entitlements.  We have to take the “blinders” off, become less myopic, and venture out of our small ponds into deep water beyond provincialism and sectarianism.  And we have to leave crippling dependencies and comfort zone callosities behind us. 

So here’s the challenge: Break through to greatness!  Shed the constricting/constraining contrived vestments and energize yourself through purposeful transformation toward a new state of “being” and “becoming”.  REAL life is to die for.  Quartermaster