When you go out for a simple walk you see many people. You see them—but do you really notice them? Today people often look like empty containers, as if they’ve left while still being there. The mind is always on a journey somewhere else.
Unfortunately this doesn’t only happen when someone is alone and lost in thought. You can see it in a conversation too, where attention keeps drifting and we jump from one topic to another by association.
The sense of alienation we often feel sometimes seems like a choice; at other times it’s an unconscious habit.
Either way, it can be traced back to the consequences of a way of life that comes from what modernity has left behind.
Most areas of life seem to suffer from the same kind of pressure. One of these is the need for results, output, profit. A clear example is the pressure in the workplace. Workers are pushed—by themselves and from outside—to produce, to deliver results, to hit the numbers.
There is often no respect, sometimes not even the most basic, for the person as a whole—body and mind and spirit.
We seem to treat others as tools, and the result is a kind of sickness whose full consequences are hard to take in.
Human beings are fundamentally drawn toward what is good, pure and kind.
We can see this in the youngest ages: children tend to respond to kindness almost by instinct, unlike many adults who, as the years go by and because of the “scars” they carry, hold back.
A person is not just flesh and a brain; they also have a soul. However hard it is to define, it is easy to recognize. We sense it when we look each other in the eyes.
We forgot the soul when we turned everything into a tool—including ourselves—and put life on autopilot.
How much could change, in the big picture and in the small, if we realized the need to stop placing the subject in opposition to the object and instead adopted a way of relating to the world and to each other? Our time asks this of us.
For more on living with presence and valuing the life we already have, read our articles Happiness as an Absolute Goal and There Is No Destination. For more on respect and empathy in how we treat others, see Ethics and Empathy: Priceless Gifts for a Society of Peaceful Coexistence.
Happy Life Team
