There's a subtlety I think many of us are missing by living in the city. To live in a big city, wherever it is, we are squeezing many parts of ourselves into a mold that was created to suit a massive amount of people. To try and be an individual here feels unnatural.
How can you truly discover what is specific and authentic about
you when you are trying to fit a general mold?
It may seem like being in a place where so much is available makes life easier but I believe this is true in the same way watching television helps the time go by faster. We may be missing out on the extent of what life has to offer by seeking the easy solution.
The other side of the coin is that maybe, it's not so easy to live in a city. There's more of a cash flow in and out of the wallet but then also more time spent thinking about it, this superficial energy which was intended to make sure basic needs could be taken care of, that we would all have enough to eat and a roof over our heads. When money becomes an end to itself, the rest of our values are twisted to match this justification, and a lot of what has to happen for this cycle to continue has to be put out of our minds in order to keep functioning on this superficial level: the laborers that make our clothes, our food, get us to work, clean up after us. When you ignore these consequences, what else are you ignoring?
A city is basically a way to survive easily on the backs of slaves. They are what sustains us and we all have to continually kill a part of our humanity to keep turning a blind eye.
Every relationship you build in the city, depends on the city to a large extent. Take it out of the city context, most relationships wouldn't survive it. Without the dinners, parties, functions that make up a city's pulse you may find that there is not enough to hold two people together, and I question if that is enough.
If someone is looking for love, how can they expect to love fully when they don't know who they are? If you are not aware of the inner workings of your soul, let alone working in tune with them, how can you expect to see another or be available to them?
Humans were meant to build and explore new worlds. It's what we've always done, it's the part of you that whispers late at night in bed: 'Travel! See the world! There is more to life than the journey to and from work!'
Our forefathers were so good at listening to this voice inside them that they created the world we are now in, and it's become too easy for us to even question it, let alone to want to explore deeper ways of living. All of us who live in a big city, or any community we had no part in designing, we are trapped in someone else's dream.
Here in New York, we have been trying to squeeze ourselves into a mold developed by white dead capitalists, taken from indigenous people, built and operated by slaves, which continues to be the case in the form of minimum wage workers, and the reason we accept this, strive to make our way into this existing dream factory, is because it's there. It's a hyped up shortcut that ends up costing us a large part of our souls.
We could be creating something tailored to our individual spirits, but prefer to avoid this kind of friction even though it is precisely this friction that humans have always waged, that would enable us to discover who we really are, and what we stand for, today.
We all hear this phrase, "live like there's no tomorrow." I believe it to be true to the extent that your journey of creating has to be fulfilling to you now. You have to feel like it is bringing you to your ultimate fruition.
For many the city mold may seem to fit perfectly. But if you can live with yourself without ever questioning the sacrifices made on the part of humanity and nature to make your life here as easy as it is,
what else are you missing? For example if you truly think what you're doing in the city is important enough to justify being rude to the waiters, cleaners, retailers, drivers and countless unseen slaves who make your daily life possible, in a place so removed from nature I wonder what other self deception occurs in the various layers of your psyche.
You don't have to move out of the city to be awake. But it starts with questions.What enables you to function while ignoring the parts of you that want to be real? What are you killing in yourself in order to survive? And ultimately, is it worth it?