Achievement

There are promising signs for humans. In so many ways this ‘humanity-making’ process is already happening - it’s an impulse to go ‘green’, and on a deeper level it could be a greening of our very consciousness. Maybe the impulse to hug a tree is not just ‘feely-feely’ but simply a sensitisation-of-thinking. It’s a willingness to bring imagination into the equation (imagine a tree feeling me hugging it!). It’s where we contemplate positive thoughts, albeit simple, like what we’re cooking for dinner tonight.
But negatively it’s also where we bring in the ‘fear element’ into our imagination - clouds with which to cloud ourselves; it’s where we swim through treacle, where achievement is linked with pain and incidentally where we’re most scruffy. Negative imagination causes us to strain too hard with self-expectation, only to end up missing the point entirely. When we don’t come from fear we’re more likely to achieve, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. Achievement itself is seductive in as much as we all prostitute our selves for it. (I won’t go there!) But in the struggle for achievement, even if we don’t sell our soul then often we opt for second best (that’s the scruffy bit!) Nobody knows why we try to short cut things, but on repetition of this bizarre behaviour habits form and we settle for material satisfactions rather than the ‘real thing’. There’s no chance of building contentment here! Isn’t this where we are drawn into the bosom of materiality … into “wanting what we haven’t got”?