Un-Alienated

Just pondering…at some point the world became a place I no longer recognized.

It’s as if it happened around me while I was going about life. You would think I would have seen it coming, especially when I found myself saying, “It used to be,” or “We used to” with greater and greater frequency. It is a very strange sensation to have lived in the same place for my whole life but to feel as if I have moved to a foreign country without going anywhere.

I have contemplated the state of the world, and the blessings and curses of technology, and the growing sense of unease in our youth, and I have shaken my head in the routine “What’s this world coming to?” manner.

Then, I realized it is time to stop.

Whatever has or hasn’t happened, or whatever should or shouldn’t be, or whatever is better or worse, I am living here in this place now at this time, so I think I better step into this here and now life.

Looking back at how things “used to be,” and thinking we have to get back there again is not only unhelpful; it is impossible. We can only move forward.

I am learning to gather the wisdom I have acquired from living when the world was “as it was” and asking how I might use that wisdom to better the world as it is. In many ways, I feel reborn into a time that is only really new because I am just now starting to fully recognize and own it rather than resent it.

Today is today. How can we make it a time that may be fondly looked back on tomorrow?