Learning To Fly
That modern, magazine cover world we were taking for granted, even if it didn’t exactly apply to our own lives, seems like it’s getting a bit frayed.
Literally to the point the old fears, of snakes and spiders and other shadowy un-named things are starting to crawl out of the corners of our subconscious in ways our modern, scientific world told us were just figments of the imagination of some pre-modern age, but are starting to take on the shapes of our modern world, of medicine and media, money and all the seemingly stable structures and strictures we’ve taken for granted, but are shifting under foot. Their dark sides growing, as the old, animating lights fade.
WTF is going on? Where are the good guys? The movies and the politics used to be about things relatable, but that middle ground is shrinking, leaving these cartoon characters, where the super villains are winning and the heroes play out as delusional tragedy.
We are finding there are ever larger forces at work, beyond even what we thought controlled our lives. Is there some cocoon to crawl back into, like a billionaire building a bunker, or are we left out to be swept away in the storm?
Our safe spaces are turning into a testing ground, as the driving forces shift from greed to fear. We are in a really big cycle, that has been going up for longer than we can barely imagine, but even the credit cards can’t keep growing.
While some civilizations have had thousands of years of ups and downs, America has only had history’s greatest growth spurt. Geography, population, industry, technology, sciences, it’s all progress, but now there is a sense of something hollow inside, that’s starting to pull the surface in.
Most of us live our lives on that surface, of interests and entertainments, friends and family. Even if we have to trudge down into the salt mines a lot. The networks making us who we are.
Yet it’s been billions of years of evolution leading up to this point in time. Do we know what’s under the surface? Do we want to know what’s under the surface? Can we really even know the surface otherwise?
The fact is that our lives are short, no matter how long we live. Might this precarious state crack open shells that need to…
