Wellness in the 21st Century

Everywhere you look people are rushing. One might wonder, "Why we should live with such hurry and waste of life"(Thoreau). 

"But I'm not wasting my life", you say. "I am working hard" you argue. 

Ah but "we are determined to be starved before we are hungry". We are willing to sacrifice all we've got for what we call "success". Yet this success is the success of business men and celebrity: a success that fails to account for our very humanity, and in doing so fails to support our very nature. In fact, "men [will] say that a stich in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stiches today to save nine tomorrow", forgetting that tomorrow will need saving as well. 

In some circles, this can be illustrated with the concept of energy points or "spoons". Every day, every person has a certain amount of energy, or "spoons", and the energy we borrow from tomorrow, affects the energy of that day. Yet we wake, pretending that we can do today exactly what we did yesterday. 

Most people, most times, fail to consider the preservation of energy or the simple fact that "Just because we can doesn't mean we should". Instead we pile on the responsibilities until we are swimming in overwhelm. We think we work to live, but in reality we are living to work. 

It's not our fault though, not entirely. It's the culture we've grown up in. It's the very American Dream that people come to this nation for. We too want to climb, and we too want acknowledgement. So we fit the standard, we meet the call and "succeed" in the expectati0n that we are meant to sweat, toil, and starve until we achieve our goals. And in doing so, we perpetuate the culture and pass it on to our children, who cry over math and collapse under the weight of their work. 

It is our responsibility to see what we do and contemplate how it affects us. It is our responsibility to challenge the status quo and demand something different. We, the people, are the only ones who can enact lasting change, but it's going to take some radical awareness to do that. 

So become aware of your energy, your moods, your needs, AND your wants. Nourish yourself so that tomorrow you can do what lights you up. And if what you do doesn't light you up, find and engage in something that does. 

That is how we start to be well.