Every so often I find it fun to try and re-articulate my worldview from scratch, often in the hope that there will be some new or interesting bit to it
1. We are cluelessly born into the middle of a bustling, chaotic story. We are tiny ants on a leaf on a branch on a tree, and everyone around us certainly seems to be in a great hurry
2. We start out as extremely local beings, embedded in our families, our peers, our communities. We inherit their beliefs, their aspirations, their traumas, their flags - most of which they inherited in turn. As children we are onboarded into their rituals and superstitions
3. Birth and death are rather solitary experiences for the person going through it (although they’re certainly social events for everyone else around them). Joining and exiting the #life channel are both weird, but apart from that, the point is obviously to connect with others
4. The metaphors are unimportant (funny & unfortunate that people get fixated on them). It doesn’t matter if we’re connected by tendrils on a World Tree, or by atoms from the Big Bang, or if we’re all bits in the Simulation Database
The point is that we’re in this *together*
The point is that we’re in this *together*
5. Having had a couple of decades to get to know people, to read, listen, observe and learn: my sense is that many people *do* want to lead nourishing, wholesome lives... but many are tired, overwhelmed, disoriented, fragmented, worn down by the relentlessness of everyday life
6. Most of us here live in modern civilisation, which is a bizzaro-psychotic prison-zoo-circus that we seldom think to question or evaluate. Because it’s home. It’s where we live. It provides us with both comforts and tortures that would’ve been *inconceivable* not too long ago
7. Stories are how we make sense of everything. We are born in the middle of many stories. We inherit some of them as received wisdom. We bump up against some of them by mistake or accident. We’re all holding on to some set of narratives and ideas, which can be reviewed & tested
8. Nobody asks to be born - this is the central joke of life. We’re born crying, the challenge is to die laughing. Not a resentful or mocking laugh, but laughter grounded in joy, surprise, love. Our (largely inherited) expectations are the setup, and reality is the punchline
