What has happened to us?
`Author: Patricia Ventura
What has happened to a world in which children get muddy, get dirty, get messy and, heaven forbid, get bored?
Do we really have to “love” our children so much that we overschedule them, making them stressed and anxious, just like ourselves?
What has happened to a world in which we can take time to sit with the people who are special to us and have long conversations about ourselves and the state of our heart and soul.
Conversations that slowly unfold, with pregnant pauses and silences that we are in no rush to fill?
How did we end up existing on a planet in which we have more and more to do with less time for leisure, less time for reflection, less time for community, less time to just... be?
It is said that Socrates, at his trial stated, " The unexamined life is not worth living ... for a human".
How are we supposed to live, to examine, to be fully human, when we are always filling our core of emptiness with golden plastic shots of illusion?
This disease of being busy is destructive to our spiritual wellbeing. It saps our ability to be fully present and keep us from forming the kind of close community that we all so desperately crave.
I am a prisoner of hope, although wondering if we really are willing to have the serious conversation necessary, given our addiction to a shallow social media where we merely share photographs and lie about our feelings.
Somehow we need to return to a more meaningful model of organizing our lives, our societies, our communities.
"It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul that it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield" - W.B.Yeats
FΩRMIdea Lisbon, 22nd november 2017.
Articles by Patrica Ventura:
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