Traveling Through Our Times

Past Perspective

One major trap is getting stuck in the past. It’s common to see our past stories as better than what we’re experiencing now.

We should learn lessons from the past. For example, in the late Sixties, the counterculture evolved, and the rallying cry was “LOVE!” as the answer to the world’s problems.  Yet the Seventies became the “me generation,” and love shifted into self-promotion. One of my college teachers asked me, “Why did love fail in the late Sixties?” His haunted look bothered me for decades.

Let’s practice flipping perspective on this question: “Why did love fail in the late Sixties?”

First step: What is love?  Twenty years of helping people have shown me that love means being more in life! Being more is a good answer in social reform: share abundance and help each other out. It’s the “teach a person to fish” answer for someone hungry. So why did “being more” fail? Because people were passive in love. Practices based on love, such as Neighborism, only work when you’re proactive in helping each other be more.

In retrospect, my answer is simple: people were passive in love and didn’t account for organized, fierce greed. When love remains passive, other forces fill the space. In the decades that followed, individualism, competition, and consumer culture increasingly taught us to pursue abundance on our own rather than create abundance together. This is the perspective I want us to flip today: instead of waiting for a better world to emerge, we actively build the world we live in together.

This example shows how flipping perspective isn’t always obvious. In the love example, the question really wasn’t “Why did love fail?” The question should have been: “Why didn’t people embrace love as an action?” The truth is, love is often taught as a more passive process. The flip side is active, persistent action based on love.

The consumer culture that grew around the modern market economy taught people to seek abundance by buying more and accumulating more on their own. The flip side is Neighborism: living together and practically sharing more through community.  It’s not easy to embrace community participation after being taught to do everything on your own, and to buy a castle to hide in alone. Let the billionaires buy their high-tech castle compounds, while we choose to live fully and embrace interconnected lives as dragons together.

Casey Insight #3: Castles are a useful metaphor for trying to protect ourselves by separating ourselves from a changing world. While they may provide temporary safety, they cannot create a healthy future on their own. Historically, even the strongest castles eventually became obsolete as times changed. However, building strong communities with realistic, open-minded perspectives allows long-term growth-based solutions.

Change of Perspective #1 – To come together!

Future Perspective

The danger isn’t simply holding onto the past to resist change. The danger is that we unconsciously carry yesterday’s assumptions into tomorrow. If we want a different future, we need to notice which parts of our old way of living we are still carrying forward.

Casey Insight #4: The average person lives toward the future based on how they lived in the past.

Let’s look at the past seventy years, and one pattern in the United States is very clear: people were taught to be independent, and the highest goal was to stand apart. Today, nearly 28% of U.S. households consist of just one person, a dramatic increase from past decades. In 1940, that number was 7.7%! Living alone and being isolated are not the same thing. A person can live alone and have a rich, connected life, while someone surrounded by people can still feel profoundly isolated. The statistic matters because it shows how dramatically our social patterns have changed and how much we still struggle as a culture to come together rather than live apart.

Casey Insight #5: When we become isolated, we lose most of our ability to participate in how society evolves.

Change of Perspective #2 – Recognize that isolation prevents us from participating in change.

Times such as ours are moments in history when society crystallizes and reinvents itself. I won’t predict how we come together to solve world problems. That is a process we each need to make happen in small steps every day. I can say large social changes begin with the small choices people make about how they live together.

So rather than predict what society will become, let me show you the kind of change I have chosen in my own life. I realized the biggest challenge I faced was how isolation was taking away my ability to participate, connect, and influence the life unfolding around me. So I reached out to begin living more proactively in my community. As we helped each other solve problems, I noticed that the best answers were always modest and kind. So I first changed my entire life toward a simple, nimble, and kind lifestyle.

I then put years of effort into small steps: building a community of dragons. Finally, I made it a daily practice to embrace my family and witness life with open eyes. Together, these steps became a livable, vibrant way of life. The world around me didn’t suddenly change because of my actions, but my life and the life of many people around me did improve. I changed the way I participated in it. Instead of asking how I could protect myself from a changing world, I began asking how I could help create a life worth sharing with others.

“Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought, go about doing good.”
– Henry David Thoreau

Casey Insight #6: My personal truth doesn’t have a destination; it’s a lifestyle that supports a full life while helping build a more graceful future world.

A destination tells us where we are supposed to arrive. A lifestyle tells us how we want to travel. In changing times, the second approach is much more useful. I don’t need to know exactly what the future will look like to know how I want to live as I travel toward it.

Hey, don’t write yourself off yet
It’s only in your head you feel left out or looked down on
Just try your best, try everything you can
-In the Middle Jimmy Eat World

It’s not too late for us to start coming together. Since we are building a new future, we don’t need to rush toward a fixed destination; we can build it one step at a time. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s too late. We can’t rebuild the future to look like the past, but we can always build a uniquely new future.

We build our future one action at a time.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step
– Lao Tzu

We don’t need to map out every step; we just need to take action, one step at a time, together.

Present Perspective

Sometimes in life, we need to reset our flow.  These are moments when a person needs to live in the moment, embrace life in the now, and see everything with fresh eyes.

Mid-career, Jethro Tull had a string of major failures. Instead of simply pushing forward and repeating what wasn’t working, the band stepped away, found a home in the woods, and reset their creative process. Changing their environment gave them a chance to see their music, and their future, with fresh eyes.

Yes, you guessed it: Songs from the Woods was the successful reset that came from that pause. Sometimes moving forward requires us to stop repeating the same pattern long enough to discover a different way forward.

Let me bring you love from the field:
poppies red and roses filled with summer rain.
To heal the wound and still the pain
that threatens again and again
– Songs from the Woods

Today, we may also need that same kind of reset: shedding the failures of the past so we can redefine how we live in harmony together.

Today’s trap is thinking we are nailed down to suffer through every unfolding problem.

Changing perspective doesn’t make difficult events disappear. It changes what we can see within them. When we see more possibilities, we have more choices, and when we have more choices, we can act rather than simply react. Changing our perspective in the middle of our problems can therefore become an important step toward improving our world.

Change of Perspective #3 – Reset your life rather than repeating what doesn’t work.

Conclusions

As we pause now to see life with new eyes, we aren’t withdrawing from life. We are changing our relationship to what is happening so we can see it more clearly. We don’t pause to do nothing or to wait; we pause to open our awareness to the moment as events unfold, to engage life.

“In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.”
-Deepak Chopra

A pause can be an active choice. It gives us enough space to notice what is happening, feel the flow of events, and choose our next action instead of automatically repeating an old response.

Notice the flows as they happen, and proactively dance in real time around each event.

Also, please note: we don’t shut off the news simply because we are overwhelmed; rather, we turn down the attention we give to the constant flow of news so it doesn’t become the flow of our entire lives. We still pay enough attention to events to make informed choices, but we turn our attention back toward ourselves, our neighbors, and our communities.

Being informed is useful. Being consumed by information can quickly overwhelm us and leave us less able to act.

Even as we pause, we still travel through life each day. Embrace your journey fully; engage with life each day with new eyes and a fresh perspective.

Casey Insight #7: These are end times only if you stop moving or stop engaging with life. These are actually beginning times for our lives, with each day ahead offering another beginning.

Discover that changing perspective doesn’t mean denying the reality of what is happening today. It means seeing possibilities within reality that allow us to act differently.

Much love & gratitude to each dragon as we travel together through our new world.