After experiencing living in a nomadic fashion all my life I have come to feel the roots of nesting, settling in at my tender advanced age. My sweet woman has come to love our home to be; soon. And my thoughts of the changes I have in mind to make, tease me into implementing old ideas held in reserve since I was a young man. Set aside areas of one's abode designed for quiet contemplation and solitude from the cacophony of modern living. It is not hard work that kills the spirit then the body proper, it's stress. Stress, in a modern society such as ours, is a built-in feature.
Observing things as a home buyer, I am riding the perfect storm of situation and opportunity, where a stressed housing market has made homes affordable again, relatively speaking, and interest rates are are historically low. And the storm arrived on the wings of skulduggery and unabridged greed, from those that will be handling our home loans, finances, investments and retirement funds. I am not feeling all that fuzzy warm over that thought. I couldn't help but think about how far I would go in using the current weight of it being a buyer's market, where distressed owners are in the straights of having to seel their homes. . . as leverage to work the asking price over like a crazed boxer in the tenth round. Get that deal.
We offered the asking price. The owners signed within three hours. Karma won. And I take close note of the feel of the energy that pervades the process, and me. Something of the order of 'paying it forward', or just plain Karma for us that think in such terms. The Law of Attraction which governs the character of our intentions and the outcome of our decisions. Socially, we've spent thirty years shaping our society through valueless rewards and unrealistic expectations. It was enticing and we fell into its charismatic spell. It induced a crazed race for materialistic dominance for trinkets and toys. Eventually, we all feel the depressing reality that we're not happy, nor content. Just stuffed from the gorging and overburdened with debt. And feeling empty.
What gives me hope for a new paradigm to take form and branch out to touch each individual through the process of social interaction, is the same function of Perfect Storm conditions. When global corporations began gobbling up smaller ones and eventually dominating entire industries such as agri-businesses, the traditional family owned business, family owned farm all but disappeared. Everyone worked for the Company. The downside to that is the same with that of the old multi-player units of my youth, where one unit held a radio, 33rpm record player and sometimes a built-in reel to reel tape recorder. When one unit failed, nothing worked. Which is why component technology came to be. When one component failed, the others worked and the component could be replaced separately. So goes the practice of agriculture, where agri-business grow 25% or more of any given crop for all the U.S. Or the case of Iowa, the corn capital of this country, growing pretty much seeding all of it's arable land for feed corn, to be sent to Kansas to feed the millions of beef cattle for slaughter. If there was say. . . a draught in California in the San Joakuin Valley which grows much of the country's vegetables. . . or corporate beef sales died and Iowa couldn't sell all that feed corn. . . corporate trucks aren't able to carry food to market. . . there's going to be a rather huge problem, and damn little to do about it.
Which is where the perfect storm of situation and condition come together to realize a different means of doing business, and perceiving something larger than immediate material gain for the social body. As was posited thirty years ago by Alvin Tofler in his writings on The Electric Cottage, we have it within our means to take control of our lives by utilizing the connection we all have at our disposal. The computer and the internet. As I am doing now. I have a photography business that is directly connected to the internet, with a web-site as well as doing web-mercials for small businesses to put on their web-sites. With the stunning losses of jobs over the past years, and with much more to come, it is becoming more and more evident that the era of corporate domination of business may be closing, and rising is the growing sense of many of us that we don't need global business jobs to live, we just need an income. If we have a talent or expertise that can be sold to a corporation for a job position, we have that same talent to sell our expertise to the public at large. And depending on our service or product, there are half a billion computers with people sitting at them strolling the internet for things they want or need.
The change is us. The new paradigm is merely changing our routines and automatic lives, to live in the moment and know what we are doing. Changing a habit is not possible, until one wants to change the habitual behavior, and that usually always demands replacing the habit, or habitual behavior with something else. An alternative. Another behavior, a replacement for the habit. And that takes volition on our part. After we've come to realize we want the change in the first place. Cognition first, volition thereafter. After being on autopilot for a lifetime cognitive self-realization is not the simple act it would seem. It tends to piss Ego off like nothing else. Usurping power over self.
So the house we will shape into home brings with it a good energy that wraps itself around the entire deal. And our lives for some time to come. I'm still working on the new paradigm.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
What are the people thinking?
Like most of you, I'm hip deep in keeping the work thing moving and staying afloat while looking for a paddle. Which isn't all that bad a position to observe things. It's the sort of thing that keeps one honest and open to the larger picture. I don't believe I'm not overstating it when I say family and home are the things on most of our minds right about now. Having said that, it also isn't hard to notice that there are divisions forming in so many areas once thought solid and sacrosanct. The conditions having changed over the past thirty years, from the opening official toast of "greed is good", bringing with it a momentum of social applause and a mindset for what America was, and is.
It is that mindset that defined America in terms of international competitiveness via multinational corporations. "What's good for America is good for business. And what's good for business is good for America" became unfettered laissez faire capitalism. How can one not feel that to be a good thing? Personally speaking, I don't feel that is a bad thing. I believe it is a naive belief. In theory it can be argued that the 'trickle down' theory works. In theory it does. What is missing in the theory is the simple variable of basic human nature. One only needs look at the repetiveness of history on this issue. My interest isn't so much on the economic theory of good business, but the philosophical question it poses. Business in the context above, as equavelent to America's very prosperity and stability, then, to be protected as an entity or agrieved aspect of society, then has apparently some innalien rights or due process. Not being an attorney or legal scholar puts that thinking into my opinion column.
However, it doesn't stop us from realizing that there is much more to a healthy and vibrant society, America, than having just that, and a vibrant society is not one that is decaying within structurally. The citizens aren't held captive to the whims of high rolling investors and the fallout throughout the business community that is the lifeblood of working Americans. It is easy to lay blame at the feet of corporations, but I think it would be misplaced. I believe the basic issue is that we the people took our eye of the goal, our collective hands off the controls, to sit back and marvel at the opulence of materialism, allowing the train to become derailed right before our eyes. And now we can't believe our lieing eyes.
A number of years ago. . . more than I'll admit, while thinking on the issues stated above, it struck me of the perils to come with the continuation of the policies set forth at that time. I smuggly thought to myself that there would come a reconning, a social payment that would be so nasty as to be poetice justice for the mindless incompitence I was seeing. And, being one within the social masses, was included in that smug thought. Though I kept that thought aside at the time. And, as things usually do in historically repititive fashion, things have gone to hell quickly. What I hadn't factored into the early thinking was that those that bring about such social & economic devastation are not themselves caught up in the tidal wave that sweeps over the social landscape. It is us commoners that finally stare disbelieving as the wave lifts high, just before it comes crashing down and sweeps away pretty much everything.
I have come to fully realize the interconnectedness of the social body, the social spirit. The energy that passes through us as we find ourselves in the same leaky boat with what we are learning are our neighbors. We aren't alone, and we are far more powerful as a group than as an individual. Relearning the basic values of village, of tribe, of community. We are not strangers or in compitition with each other, even if we each sell our wares in the same market. It is apparent to me now that any poetic justice to be handed out won't be at the high end of the social strata. It is and will be us. And that doesn't make me feel smug. It brings a sort of resigned sadness philosophically, and a pain to the heart. Those people I see out there. . . are neighbors, even though they have a different zip code or state to call home. The thing that makes it all doable for me is knowing that at some point in time, there will be a social realization of interconnectedness and stewardship of our America. Which I truly believe was the original intent of our founding documents and the thinking that went into writing them. Things just tend to get altered along the way while erstwhile hands tune our destiny.
It is that mindset that defined America in terms of international competitiveness via multinational corporations. "What's good for America is good for business. And what's good for business is good for America" became unfettered laissez faire capitalism. How can one not feel that to be a good thing? Personally speaking, I don't feel that is a bad thing. I believe it is a naive belief. In theory it can be argued that the 'trickle down' theory works. In theory it does. What is missing in the theory is the simple variable of basic human nature. One only needs look at the repetiveness of history on this issue. My interest isn't so much on the economic theory of good business, but the philosophical question it poses. Business in the context above, as equavelent to America's very prosperity and stability, then, to be protected as an entity or agrieved aspect of society, then has apparently some innalien rights or due process. Not being an attorney or legal scholar puts that thinking into my opinion column.
However, it doesn't stop us from realizing that there is much more to a healthy and vibrant society, America, than having just that, and a vibrant society is not one that is decaying within structurally. The citizens aren't held captive to the whims of high rolling investors and the fallout throughout the business community that is the lifeblood of working Americans. It is easy to lay blame at the feet of corporations, but I think it would be misplaced. I believe the basic issue is that we the people took our eye of the goal, our collective hands off the controls, to sit back and marvel at the opulence of materialism, allowing the train to become derailed right before our eyes. And now we can't believe our lieing eyes.
A number of years ago. . . more than I'll admit, while thinking on the issues stated above, it struck me of the perils to come with the continuation of the policies set forth at that time. I smuggly thought to myself that there would come a reconning, a social payment that would be so nasty as to be poetice justice for the mindless incompitence I was seeing. And, being one within the social masses, was included in that smug thought. Though I kept that thought aside at the time. And, as things usually do in historically repititive fashion, things have gone to hell quickly. What I hadn't factored into the early thinking was that those that bring about such social & economic devastation are not themselves caught up in the tidal wave that sweeps over the social landscape. It is us commoners that finally stare disbelieving as the wave lifts high, just before it comes crashing down and sweeps away pretty much everything.
I have come to fully realize the interconnectedness of the social body, the social spirit. The energy that passes through us as we find ourselves in the same leaky boat with what we are learning are our neighbors. We aren't alone, and we are far more powerful as a group than as an individual. Relearning the basic values of village, of tribe, of community. We are not strangers or in compitition with each other, even if we each sell our wares in the same market. It is apparent to me now that any poetic justice to be handed out won't be at the high end of the social strata. It is and will be us. And that doesn't make me feel smug. It brings a sort of resigned sadness philosophically, and a pain to the heart. Those people I see out there. . . are neighbors, even though they have a different zip code or state to call home. The thing that makes it all doable for me is knowing that at some point in time, there will be a social realization of interconnectedness and stewardship of our America. Which I truly believe was the original intent of our founding documents and the thinking that went into writing them. Things just tend to get altered along the way while erstwhile hands tune our destiny.
Monday, February 2, 2009
A short beginning:
I have been writing since I was a young teenager. My fancy for words came in the form of prose. I continue to appreciate that form of writing for my personal work, yet over the ensuing years of study found myself writing in scientific form or business form. On the one hand, these forms have an advantage of being a concrete set of standards which if followed, led to a formal conclusion that was then peer reviewed for form, thesis and conclusion; backed up with conclusive evidence.
Prose on the other hand, demands a sense of the Muse along with a boat load of imagination and perseverance. And loads of time. Writing a blog. . . for me. . . is a stream of consciousness activity. Formal rambling, really.
The most socially watched event today is the state our nation is in. This affects each and every one of us, like it or not. There are of course many paths of exploration into the current events unfolding, from a number of perspectives and persuasions. The perspective I personally take in observing a social event is from the studies in anthropology I have had, which I find to be very good tools for such a task. I bring this up as this will define the message as I progress through the issues I see as pertinent to the events within our social body, our culture as Americans.
The one element most lacking for me right now is time. Work demands, home and family, buying a house. . . normal stuff for most of us. And it takes most of our waking hours to address. Which will be one of the rambles. . . I mean blogs that will be forthcoming. As I said, this will be a short beginning; an further introduction of sorts. What I can only hope is that with cool heads and hard work it is possible to dig our collective selves out of the hole we are currently in. That's the plan.
Prose on the other hand, demands a sense of the Muse along with a boat load of imagination and perseverance. And loads of time. Writing a blog. . . for me. . . is a stream of consciousness activity. Formal rambling, really.
The most socially watched event today is the state our nation is in. This affects each and every one of us, like it or not. There are of course many paths of exploration into the current events unfolding, from a number of perspectives and persuasions. The perspective I personally take in observing a social event is from the studies in anthropology I have had, which I find to be very good tools for such a task. I bring this up as this will define the message as I progress through the issues I see as pertinent to the events within our social body, our culture as Americans.
The one element most lacking for me right now is time. Work demands, home and family, buying a house. . . normal stuff for most of us. And it takes most of our waking hours to address. Which will be one of the rambles. . . I mean blogs that will be forthcoming. As I said, this will be a short beginning; an further introduction of sorts. What I can only hope is that with cool heads and hard work it is possible to dig our collective selves out of the hole we are currently in. That's the plan.
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