By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
The mills of the gods grind slowly, so they say, and as far as I can tell, just about everything is grist for the mill. I can’t verify the first; it seems that lately the grinding has gotten faster and more painful, but I’ll vouch for that last: everything we experience was grown from our own expectations and projections, the final product of some collective agreement among us, waiting its turn at the shredder.
With each piece of incoming information, we must extract what wisdom is available and quickly, because no matter how difficult an event, life does not stand still. The turning gears will press out the next situation in no time — a new set of circumstances, a new tableau of challenges and opportunities — because we can’t NOT strive toward some kind of final outcome. We misunderstand what ‘final’ means, sadly, but we’re pretty sure that ‘outcome’ is the measure of our ‘success.’ All three words define our current plane of consciousness. It seems to me that we’ve been on the road to somewhere for a long time but we can’t begin to get there until we redefine those three words.
We’re a busy species, always up to something, always rearranging things to suit us and then chiseling them in stone, attempting a freeze-frame, trying to capture lightning in a bottle. That’s the problem with our attempt to ‘finalize’ what is constantly moving and flexing, a stumbling, inept exercise. Anxious for a 21st century that rises above the darker shadows of the 20th, some want to craft a governmental system that is responsive to the ever-shifting energy of change and progress; others want to recreate what is long gone, fearful of where change might take us, and with whom.