Thoughts on Liberation (Part I)

People have a tendency to build defenses against plurality. Rather than invest themselves in a variety of things or get involved in new experiences, they defer life for their personal status quo. Just watch a busy street that has someone trying to get people to sign a political petition or donate to an environmental cause. People have a strong impulse simply not to care, and they don't have a second thought about whether that position of apathy is justified or not. The most reasoning you will get from a contemporary American is: "Sorry, don't have enough time". Not enough time, really? What is time that it can be saved up in such a way? What better thing were you planning to do with those extra few minutes? Drink a coffee and text message your friends? What they should say is that they don't have the emotional stamina to do anything that requires them to move out of their comfort zone.

It seems as though we have been infiltrated by capitalism's ideal of specialization in the division of labour, so we invest ourselves and all our activities towards developing one skill or one facet of our lives. This certainly worked for Henry Ford in making car production more efficient - one man moulds the drive shaft, the other drills in the axles, etc. etc. They each become experts at their individual tasks and collectively speed up the building process. But this was only their day-job, they did not identify themselves by their mechanical task as a "lever-puller" or "joint-twister". Why then, do we attach ourselves and let ourselves be guided by such generalizations in our contemporary way of living?

If we toss off all general categories like "thinker", "artist", "businessman", "the life of the party", "the faithful girlfriend" (blech!), etc. and we allow ourselves instead to thrive off the richness of particulars, perhaps we can escape this tendency to close ourselves off from the world. By being fascinated with the localized particulars of life, attending to them as they reveal themselves to us, we are able to simultaneously respect our authentic self as well as the world. We respect ourselves by opening up to what we naturally inclines towards and we respect the world by being attuned to all the possibilities it offers to us. The world will give to us, every week (if not every day), new experiences, people, activities, and thoughts that have ample enough substance to dwell on, appreciate, and investigate. There is no need to form a preconception beforehand of what we are going to involve ourselves in or deliberately ignore. Let us become instead infinitely open to all the minutiae that life offers us every day. This doesn't mean that we don't have ideals that we will hold to even under difficult circumstances. It only acknowledges that everything deserves to be open for consideration, because none among us is ever so wise or elevated that we cannot learn something new from the natural world or the study of the character of another human.

The whole of natural science begins with a very simple sense of wonder at the natural world - in hearing the birds that sing in the morning, in feeling the rain patter upon our cheeks from grey and heavy clouds at dusk, and in watching as the seed in the ground becomes a flowering plant. The earth offers us a wealth of possibilities for thought and wonder that are easy to ignore, simply because our science textbooks have already told us how these things work! The whole theory of evolution is discoverable in the confines of a local park; who could say that it wouldn't be a thrilling enterprise to rediscover in your local habitat all the principles that serve to explain the origins of life across the whole earth and which have been working for billions of years?

Natural science is just one example of the enormity available to us in the simple experiences of a day, a week, a month. There are infinitely many wellsprings of inspiration to discover, though perhaps 'discover' isn't the right word to describe this occurance. To allow something in life to distinctly call to us is much different than searching out some determinable thing that we force to fit with an idea we have or others have about ourselves concerning who we ought to be (a student, a wife, a daughter, or more abstract things like 'a success' or ' a moneymaker'). We don't discover the source of our inspiration so much as the inspiration discovers us:

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark - now glittering - now reflecting gloom -
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
of waters - with a soul but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rock ceaselessly bursts and raves.

This wellspring brings us, we priveleged (in some sense) species of ape, its tribute of inspiring waters. Are we ready to give it notice and draw from it with our rustic buckets?