I hope naturenut does well on her path, and wish her the best. As one who fits the description of those who 'defend the job and work world as it is,' I would like to take this opportunity to do a little 'splainin.
I have been grappling with the nature of our reality for the greater amount of my adult life. Some days I still feel like a child wandering alone in the wilderness, vaguely aware of the dangers of such an enterprise, yet curious nonetheless. I started my search young, always fascinated by history and I remember being quite drawn to the Grail stories and medieval history in particular. I found myself studying the works of Teodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, Naomi Klein and Ellie Wiesel (to name a few) in high school and their insights produced in me a desire to study philosophy, religion and politics in university for a time. This was also about the same time as the movies of the Matrix series came out, and I refer to them because they provide a useful allegory to our reality.
I come from a middle class family, and my mother raised me on her own until I was about three, when she met the man who would become my stepfather. He wrote his masters in social work after achieving a bachelors in philosophy. My mother is an avid reader, and many conversations I remember in our household were of a political or philosophical nature. It was during my rebellious, hormone driven late teenage years which also coincided with the 9/11 attacks that the matrix, for me, began to become apparent. I became disenchanted with my studies in university, noting that there was a clear manipulation for people to conform and tow a certain ideological line that I really wasn't equipped to explain, yet felt the wrongness of it deeply. I dropped out, an began to work several different jobs to get by. My life was blessed with the support of family, yet there are events, like 9/11, that happen in a family that make you question the foundation of your identity.
For example, my uncle committed suicide when I was about 12. I was never directly informed that it was in fact suicide, and to this day none of my family has ever felt the need to inform me and I believe it was and is at the behest of my mother, who I assume felt the need to protect me from this information from a motherly place. While I understand that decision, it occurs to me that that level of deception is far more unhealthy than confronting and being open and engaging a dialogue would have been. Because, once I sussed it out through piecing the puzzle together an the sometimes loose tongues of my family, the result is that I carry a bit of a grudge regarding that deception. I feel I deserve to know the truth, and if someone willfully blinds me from it for their own purposes, it is not an ideal situation to say the least.
Then, when I was studying in university, my grandmother with whom I spent much time with growing up as my parents both worked away at their middle class jobs, she passed and this impacted me. Probably because the resulting drama spelled the end of my stepfather and mother's relationships. So, I was 19, my parents were divorcing, my grandmother had recently passed, and I was cluing in to the fact that my family had hidden a fairly important piece of information away from me which robbed me of my ability to understand the reality of a major event in my young life. The stress got to me, I dropped out as I had mentioned, and began to pursue blue collar work as I had now observed the results of two people with professional jobs or educational backgrounds who were very close to me basically implode and given that they encouraged me to pursue a professional education to become a lawyer or a teacher, and being that I was young and rebellious, it seemed to make sense to me at the time.
However, as I began to do the blue collar labour jobs; I worked as a sous chef, a security guard and a landscaper, I always had the deeper philosophical yearning somewhere just under the surface. I did the menial manual tasks, and noted the type of treatment that workers typically receive and the type of lifestyle one can attain if one allows themselves to be imprisoned by these types of jobs in heirarchical employment with larger businesses. But, I was also personally troubled by depression at times, and by substance abuse and several relationships that didn't end well. I finally found a great mentor, who taught me the trade I ply now, and the relationship I have with him is still one I treasure.
He challenged my pride, my ego, my work ethic and taught me how to be a swinger of birches. He taught me of the value of trees yet also taught me that this world will have you kill something beatiful and ancient because someone wishes to obviate themselves of the necessity of raking leaves a couple of times a year. He moulded me into a competent arborist, and gave me the tools I needed to do it on my own. However, these days are also ones I recall being quite void of the pursuit of truth, because I would come home so danged tired that it would be dinner and bed without much energy left for the seeking.
I met a wonderful woman, and we started a family. We moved away from the city I was born in and ended up in a beautiful valley where we have built a home and I've started a business with the skills and knowledge gained from deciding to spurn the path my family was leading me down and pursued something different. I'm now at the point where I feel that there is a clear path out of the mire and burden imposed by the predatory financial system and can see a path to freedom. But, I'm encumbered with a some business debt, a mortgage (no it does not escape my notice that the Latin root for mortgage is death grip) and aware of the nefarious and nebulous tentacles of the matrix, the system of control that seeks enslave us and extract energy from us like the pods containing humans in the matrix. And I'm aware our eyes have had woollen blinders and our activities coerced to conceal from us true meaning of our collective potential as something other than lunch.
I've been there, felt the crushing weight of financial responsibility and the absurd necessity to exist within the control system of the matrix. I have three beautiful boys to raise and a wife and a home to support and maintain, and some days it feels like a really heavy load to bear. But, my experiences have taught me that while we are food, and energy for parasites that we cannot control, we don't have to see from the same lens. While we are busy working away at a debt that was incurrd only because someone had enough money to lend and laws allow them to rent that money out and some days that makes me want to scream, I still have the knowledge that bearing that heavy load and allowing those parasite to feed, doesn't mean I'm a slave. I'm aware of the control system, I have a strong back an business model that allow me to make the most of my time away from home and I have a plan for financial insulation that will one day allow me to more freely pursue the work.
But I am not a slave, while I may not have been in complete control of all the events in my life and the way in which they have transpired, I am in control of the way in which I react. I have used that to build a life and taken control of my own destiny through self employment, but yes there are somedays in which I feel the weight of it all. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, a wise man once said, and I feel the suffering of my brothers and sisters suppressed and repressed around this rock.
Did not Gurdjieff say that those who were weak in life would also be weak in the work? We all have a hard road to travel, but the way we respond to the obstacles and challenges we face is what defines us. We have control over those instances, or at least we ought to, and the way we face those moments every minute of everyday is the standard by which we will be judged. I hope I live up to the expectations of my children, yet know I fail them as well. I know this world can be perceived as a quagmire, yet I feel we have to keep our chins up and carry on.
So yeah, I don't agree with the current paradigm of the economy, but that doesn't much matter. I have mouths to nourish, and a better future to build for them, so I buckle down, sacrifice time, energy, blood, sweat and tears and I know, that when life presents me with an obstacle, it is an opportunity to act rightly and overcome, not an insurmountable barrier.
