Sunday In The Park

Have no fear! It will get much worse before it gets better, and you and I are not likely to see the better part, if history is any judge.

This is one of those rare moments in time when everything collapses and starts afresh. It happens roughly every 500 years. The last one was the Age of Exploration, when suddenly the entire world became accessible and no longer the sole purview of the elite few. The world was mapped in its entirely and the information made available to the masses through the printing press.

Tourism was born and suddenly humans were able to see more of the world in a year than their ancestors had seen in many lifetimes.

The press led to telecommunications and the internet. One no longer had to go to the library, if one's neighborhood even had a library, but the sum total of the world's knowledge could be brought to your handheld device almost anywhere in the world.

We are on the verge of something just as magnificent and profound, though for those of us in the midst of it, it looks frightening, chaotic and dangerous.

To a villager 600 years ago, anything more than a day or two walk from home must have seemed terrifying - a realm full of monsters and spirits that only heroes and fools dared to go. Now a man born in Texas and living in Indonesia can clack away on a device and reach a global audience.

In a sense, we humans are just finishing our teenage years. As toddlers, we rarely left our backyards. As teens, we suddenly discovered a wider world and pushed our boundaries. Now we, as a species, have reached young adulthood and must leave our nest and enter the larger Universe. Those mature individuals among us remember those first tenuous steps outside the protective shell and the fear and trepidation we felt. That moment is what we are experiencing now as a species.

To a certain extent, globalism is winning, but it is not the kind the elites have been trying to foist on us. They have plotted for centuries to control and direct this inevitable movement for their benefit, but they are losing control and failing miserably. They will continue to fight and exert their errors, as they recently did in Ireland, but that is a tiny victory in a massive wave of change.

If one stands too close to a painting, one only sees the brush strokes and loses the glory of the image. Put another way, individual stitches in a tapestry are meaningless without the overall context.

From the level of the stitches, things are and will continue to get more chaotic, but from the view of the tapestry, it is an exciting time to be alive and see this natural and organic process in action. From our current perspective within the tapestry, we cannot imagine what the outcome will be, but using history as our camera, we can get a glimpse of the Big Picture and know that humanity is finally entering its long-awaited adulthood.

This is a perfectly normal and expected phase, just as parents plot and track a child's development. Just as a child comes to adulthood and no longer relies on the parents, but rather achieves independence, so too is humanity outgrowing the grasp of our controllers and expanding into a realm they (and we) have long feared.

We have outgrown the institutions of our childhood - religion, government - and must now create new institutions that serve us as adults. We are no longer told to go to bed at a certain time, or that we can't have dessert until our dinner is finished. We must make those choices for ourselves, and we are learning (even now) the consequences of making the wrong choices. At some point, we will learn the wisdom of our parents/institutions, even as we reject their foibles.

Yes, it is a time of chaos. We are going through profound changes in our collective body, mind and spirit. We are realizing that we must internalize our control structure and not depend on our parents for it.

On the plus side, we are free. We can do anything and go anywhere we choose, as long as we are willing to put in the effort to achieve it.

It is not an easy transition, but it is a necessary one. Like our metaphorical tapestry, some stitches will get dropped; it is inevitable as much as it is painful. However, from the perspective of the overall image, it is invisible and does not affect the result. Yes, the institutions of control will deceive, fight and even kill to maintain their control, but they are as doomed to fail as we are destined to grow beyond them.

Don't give up and keep working on an individual level to change things for the better. It is the death of winter that makes the spring possible.

Onward through the fog!

A note about the image at top. It is a painting called, "A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatter," by Georges Seurat. It is a massive painting with the foreground characters being far larger than an average human. Up close, it is nothing but a million dots of color, a style called Pointillism pioneered by Seurat. You have to stand at least 10 meters away to see the entire picture. If you are ever in Paris, I highly recommend having a look at it. Quite amazing in its copious detail and overall simplicity.