Just Do it Now

Last week I had a variety of things to organise, all with a time limit. As things started to descend into chaos, my stress levels went up and so did my irritation. Like most of us I hate that feeling. Then something went right, and it all disappeared, leaving me wondering. It was just so clear that the chaos had caused the stress and its attendant irritation.

But we can’t avoid chaos as it’s a part of the change factor that is essential to our movement through this material plane. Structure is also one of those essentials.  Without our bones our whole body would collapse. Life being a fractal, what’s true for the body is also true for the whole of Life. So, we just get the structure in our lives stable and along comes change and messes with it sending us into the chaotic phase between one stability and another. Unavoidable. This process is dependent on the choices we make and the actions we take to kick-start them into being. We cannot stay with one set of structures because, like it or not, we grow out of them. They no longer meet our needs. So, as I have mentioned in a previous article the whole deal is needs based.

Meeting our needs is the act of a responsible adult that has learnt the skills in childhood, being able now to apply that knowledge for themselves. Common sense. Stress is a natural part of that process and when the need is met with a new structure is put in place to provide it, we relax. Except there is a spanner in the works. During childhood, we also learned that we had to make the ‘right’ choices, taking our parents’ ideas about life into consideration. At that time in life, we had very few choices to make about how we lived. They were largely taken care of. Still, when we did need to choose, we found ourselves in the dilemma of who to please. We have been encouraged to always think of others’ needs first. If, however, we had also been shown the importance of our own needs for our survival, we would have had a more balanced set of priorities to rely on in adulthood.

Unfortunately, we are mostly stuck between a rock and a hard place. The continued need to choose confronts this issue as we doubt ourselves, deliberate on the possible effects of our actions on everyone from the Prime Minister to the dog next door, and do nothing! The natural stress accompanying all change is elongated into a life of constant anxiety, brought about by indecision and the lack of action. Our feelings of self-confidence, if we were ever allowed to develop any, are challenged frequently, often leading to what ‘they’ label (I hate labels) an anxiety disorder. Rather than being taught the importance of basing our decisions on our own needs, we are handed a prescription for a drug, we are likely to be on the rest of our lives if we don’t learn the importance of meeting our needs.

We have another problem. The whole human race is currently stressed out of our minds for exactly the same reason. Our culture doesn’t want us to put our health and wellbeing first because if we did, most of us would walk away from our jobs, leaving the economic system to collapse. Many of us would walk away from our relationships, causing change to the structure of society. A society that is constructed, not to meet your needs or mine, but to serve the needs of the established hierarchy.  As a result, our needs are confounded all the time, leaving us in ongoing chaos. See what I mean?

The vested interests have an investment in things remaining the same, unless they initiate the changes for profit. You’ll notice when social trends occur that contradict their needs, there is an immediate campaign to stamp it out. When I was young, we had had enough of war. We started a movement to make love not fight (fun while it lasted), we came up with all kinds of brilliant ideas, like spirituality, therapy, and saving the environment. We tried living in intentional communities based on these principle. Men grew their hair and women threw away their bras. We eschewed capitalism, attempting to live lightly on the planet. No profit in that.

Next thing we know we are being called ‘dirty hippies’. And on it goes. ‘Flaky New Agers’ of the 80” are now followed by the ‘woke’ (the state of being awake to what’s going on in our world) has become a catch cry for being stupid and politically correct. And on it goes. Unfortunately, this works. It encourages people to stay with the current mainstream thought, changing nothing. Is it any wonder then, that there are so many unmet needs, for so many people, that we live in a constant state of fear and chaos. If we dare to step out from under, we will be squashed by yet another campaign to shut us up.

But change it must, we must. To not do so is against the principles of life. We must be free to meet our own needs. There is a point when we just have to let the consequences follow for those that are affected by our choices. If the stagnation wasn’t working for you, it wasn’t working for anyone tangential to you, even though they may have been in denial about that. They too were trying to keep everyone happy, and, like the rest of us that have tried it, failing miserably. Everything must move on along the conveyor belt of life and time. Sooner or later, if we don’t, we find ourselves in crisis. What is true for you and me is also true for the species as a whole. We cannot hold up change for long or it just bulldozes us out of the way. At that stage, the crisis that ensues is a lot worse for everyone. It takes a long time to build a new structure. If we build it on the same precepts as the old one, it will only be a matter of time before the crisis repeats itself, worse and worse each time you ignore the needs at the core of your being because you are scared of upsetting others. I don’t really need to point out to most of you how this is being mirrored in the bigger stage.

What can you do? On the bigger picture, very little. But every bit changes things for the better. Individually, we can learn to listen to our gut feelings, having the courage to make the choice that feels right to us before the thinking kicks in. Because once it does we’ll go around the roundabout once again, stressed as hell.