Gut Check

Have you checked your daily life against your mission statement recently? I did mine yesterday, and discovered that some adjustments were in order.

Ideally, the bulk of our time should be spent doing things related to our life’s mission, or in recreational pursuits that feed and renew our energy for the things that matter most to us. My personal statement runs as follows:

“To bring enlightenment, beauty and inspiration into the world through words and music, and to deeply care for the human and other sentient beings in my world.”

What I found upon checking my datebook was that I’d been doing quite a bit to tend to the latter part of that mission (although a bit more would be good): both my two elderly feline companions and the rest of my family have been getting a lot of quality time from me. The other side of the ledger, the writing/music-making side, didn’t get the time it deserves lately. Time to go about rebalancing!

If the things we’re most committed to are getting short shrift in our daily lives, it can be helpful to get a sense of what’s occupying our time in their stead. It turns out I’d been connecting with people in real time on social media, and having really fascinating and substantive talks about ideas with highly insightful people. So that’s a good thing! Now, I just have to allocate a little more time to writing in other fora; I can take ideas from my online dialogues and make them into pieces to inspire and inform readers.

And I’ve really got to get back into the studio and do some recording. The songs inside us don’t do anyone any good if they stay there. They have to be harvested from deep within, lovingly crafted, and skillfully sung.

So, how do things stack up in your own gut-check? If you check your datebook against your statement of purpose, will you find you’ve been spending significant time engaged in activities related to your mission, or in recreation that supports them? If not, you may want to make some changes.

Of course, sometimes things go quite the other way round. Our purposes are evolving all the time; sometimes evidence that you’re involved more and more in something else of value may prompt you to amend your mission statement. The healthiest people spiritually, I believe, are those attuned to the subtle messages received from their subconscious minds and from the phenomenal world. They are intuitive and flexible enough to make subtle changes to their lives in the light of new insights. And that's a really good thing!

Who Remembers This Erstwhile Convention?

There was once an almost-universal American "civic religion" that rode alongside people's actual faith traditions like a sidecar to a motorcycle. Citizens generally respected other citizens' religions; or, if not their faiths themselves, at least their right to practice them unmolested. Church/state separation was a given; intrusions into highly personal bioethical matters of conscience were largely -- and rightly -- considered in poor taste.

Thanks to the pernicious rise of the religious right, all those pro-social civic conventions were infected, compromised. Hitchens was absolutely correct in observing that the evil Falwell and his criminal associates did would live on long after them.

We need to keep encouraging the widespread outbreak of secularism that's sweeping the country right now. It's fed largely by demographic and generational change; still, our best, unwitting allies in this effort are the ever-more-extreme, morally bankrupt, and politically-engaged right-wing Xtians themselves. Their inhumanity and empathy deficits are doing more to drive Americans into a wholesale embrace of humanist values than the best-coordinated anti-theist campaigns could possibly accomplish on their own.