I've seen countless sunsets in my time and a number of sunrises. More often than not, I am so captivated by the magic of the event that my brain almost shuts down. Recently however, this was not the case. It was the week of a full moon and also the conjunction between Jupiter and Venus, events which have been the hype of astrologers and stargazers far and wide. I drove to my "thinking place," which is far from the city, by the water at the entrance to a port where I watch the ships come and go, the fisherman catch their dinners and people coming and going continuously.
On this particular afternoon after a long day of thought and inner processing, I reached an epiphany of sorts. The sun rises in the east, and then sets in the west. Regardless of what anyone or anything says or does, it just continues to do what it does. It does this day in day out and even when it sets in our hemisphere, it is illuminating another part of our planet and has been doing so for quite some time. The sun makes no apology for its presence, it does not seemingly adjust itself for us at our request, it just does what it does and WE are the ones who make adjustments in our lives to cater for it.
This then lead me to thinking about who we are as humans and the theme of transformation and the journey we embark on to find ourselves. We're told from a young age how to behave, instructed almost as to curb our innate being to "belong" in social situations. We're punished for being "bad" and rewarded for being "good." At what point are we just accepted for just being? What would this world look like?
I see the need, I guess you could say, for social norms to an extent, but at what cost to our souls and who we are at the core are these social norms impacting us? The more we are coerced into existing within a set of rules in which a society has concocted, are we at risk of losing our individual identities and becoming one mass programmed consciousness? In everyday life, is someone being who they truly are, accepted by all? Should they be? Should we all be toning it down to a certain extent? Or should we all be keeping our opinions to ourselves and just let others be who they truly wish to be? Providing of course that is is not causing any direct harm to another living being -- this I'm sure you will all agree.
I can see how rules and norms all began. We always need to modify the wheel to some extent as we seemingly evolve as the year's progress and I wonder if it is possible to truly have a unique end goal in mind from the beginning? What is the true definition of Utopia? Is it a world where we do exist in peace and just do what we do in order to have our needs met and survive? What would a world look like without rules and norms? Are we not born with common sense, initiative or our intuition, which guides us in seeing what is right, or what is wrong?
As the sun rises and sets, it keeps burning, regardless of what we, anyone or anything says. It does what it does without an apology because really, what does it have to apologize for? The sun knows its place and it provides us with light and warmth and we do the best we can with it and have done for a long time. So why not allow each other to do what we do without needing to adjust, modify or apologize for our behaviors or actions and just simply adjust? Have we become so used to being regulated that we could simply not adjust to being unregulated? That in itself is a scary thought. A world where humans become so detached from who they are at the core of their being due to external influences and distractions is a world headed for a destination I do not want to see. I almost want to use the word change here and how we must, but I feel as if just being is a more fitting expression. If we were just to be, everything would just be, and therefore things would just flow, just as they're meant to. I believe the reasons we endure such hardships as humans sometimes is that we forget that we are transmittal devices that for some reason, choose to block the signals heading for us and those that need to head from us for shiny, shallow distractions and that, is sad.
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