Stream of Consciousness
I’ve been writing this article on and off for the last couple of weeks. This is just me writing for the sake of writing. Think of it as how I process my thoughts.
I was pondering the other day about what makes CD and I different from others in our generation. We are sure others our age are living similarly, but we can't find them.
One of the first goals we came up with while creating this website was to find people of our generation who have looked at the writing on the wall and changed how they live. We are looking for these people so we can put our heads together to help figure out what comes next.
We didn't expect to find people who aren't of our generation who have already proven their friendship. Chris and I approach situations with a similar mindset—we are confident in what we know, so we let the other person show us how much they know. It's a quick way to weed out the people who are just interested in this lifestyle for its aesthetic appeal. We are delighted to find people who not only speak the same language but who also live the life as we do.
We already cherish the people we have gathered around us, but we are still being called to reach more. Each of us gets this feeling in our chest when we publish another piece of our mind onto this site. Every article we write exists as living documentation of our trials and successes. They are us in the written word and are sacred in a way.
Being candid and emotionally vulnerable to elicit an empathetic spark in someone who understands our thoughts is a risky choice, but the method seems to endure. We pour ourselves into the words to prove our authenticity and plead for kindred spirits.
Recently, CD and I discussed being on different planes of existence with the people around us. Broken down, this means we as humans are not all living in the same universe—metaphysically. We all operate with our own set of facts and truths. We are essentially micro universes unto ourselves. What I believe brings people together is finding balance and harmonizing their planes.
How does one harmonize their plane with another’s? I’m not sure yet—that might be a mystery for which we have no answer. However, my observations lead me to believe we harmonize our planes through communication and understanding. How do you get someone to notice you? You reach out and get them to see you.
For the last couple of weeks, I've been intensely examining mankind's inhumane treatment of the animal kingdom. Since I've started raising chickens, I no longer consume chicken. Their egg production, manure, and natural scratch-tilling abilities make them far more useful than feeding to raise them until they are old enough to eat in one meal. When you do a cost-benefit analysis keeping a chicken alive, happy, and healthy vastly outweighs a barbecue dinner.
CD brought up the situation where we have too many rooters—what will we do? If we make decisions based on the good of the flock, the obvious answer would be to end some of their lives humanely. I understand this argument, but I don't know if I’m capable of taking what I perceive to be an innocent life. I've been to war, and I've seen death. So I'm not interested anymore.
Sometimes I miss my family. If this is your first time reading something of mine, I’d look at some of the mental health articles to get the backstory. I’m not sure if I miss them or the idea of them; the potential of what could have been. When I reminisce about my childhood, it’s easy to get lost in the great days because I genuinely have some enjoyable memories from childhood. The problem is when I remember the bad days.
While the good days are great, it takes about a thousand of them to erase the sting of one bad day. CD and I both get sad when we think about family because we lament the families we could have had. It’s taken us a few years to get to the point where we can talk about days we are stuck in the past and communicate our feelings.
It‘s sad to think I’ll never have a relationship with them again, but that wasn’t my choice—it was theirs. I tried many times in my adult life to explain my frustrations with our unequal relationship, but I was called selfish (among other more colorful names), abused, used, and neglected. I explained myself and my childhood to my grandparents, and they were so stunned that my parents treated me with such disgusting vitriol, but they did nothing to confront my parents. That hurt me. A couple of months later, on Christmas Eve, my brother got into a heated exchange with my “father” and called me in a panic. He left the house and didn’t know where he was going to go. I lived over 3 hours away and couldn’t do much to help. Finally, I called my grandparents to help him, and they said about my parents, “If they keep doing this shit, we are done talking to them.“ Unfortunately, that was an empty platitude.
Other people‘s lack of emotional intelligence is something that has been bothering me more and more recently. I’ve been working on being more patient and understanding when things don’t go exactly as expected. Still, I keep finding myself in situations where I am losing my patience quickly, and this usually happens when someone else does something or reacts to me in a certain way.
It makes me feel like a fraud when I extol the virtues of emotional intelligence, but I lose my sense of self when confronted with a bad situation. I guess I have to chalk it up to still needing to learn more and practice my mitigation steps when I find myself triggered.
Recently I’ve been reading (devouring) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity—this book examines the history of humanity. It's incredibly compelling and should be required reading (my opinion). One question that came to my mind while reading the book is the length of time it's taken humans to advance to where we are today. For example, did you know the washing machine wasn't invented until 1937? Think about how much has changed since then. Less than 100 years ago, everyone was washing their clothes by hand. As a species, we spent thousands and thousands of years with seemingly no technological advancement, and then it exploded.
It took me a while to realize, and I'm sure I'm not the first, but it took so long because the resources had to be found, studied, and experimented with. During this time of arduous discovery, man did not have the luxury of sitting down and thinking beyond where they were going for their next hunt or how best to protect and support their families.
When resources became easier to obtain through sea travel and trading, there was more time for creativity and thinking. The renaissance, between the 14th and 17th centuries A.D., was a time of extraordinary expansion into the realms of art and science. With the accessibility to worldwide travel becoming more common, people were finally exploring further than they ever had before. Of course, people have been traveling and exploring for thousands of years, but we didn't see the fruit of the labors until relatively recently in modern history.
I bring this up in my stream of consciousness because I foresee a nosedive in creativity and pursuits that don't have to do with growing your own food and trying to maintain a level of normalcy. Tough times will force the weak men of today to either stand up and make bold decisions, or reality will make the decisions for them, and they will become irrelevant.
Thank you for reading; I think I'd like to continue this theme of a stream of consciousness because it's a way for me to get some short thoughts out without putting them all into separate articles. If you liked this article and want to support our mission, please think about sending a tip to us here!