Second

November 21, 2021

My hope is that this post, at the end of the day, is empowering in a positive way. However, after writing it I could see how it would seem a little dark at times. So before beginning I'll throw in a Rumi quote that I often go back to.

"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself"

~ Rumi

The past week (maybe past month and year) it has been hard at times for me to be optimistic about the path our whole society is headed down. Just from individual encounters I see people so narrowly focused on their own lives, their own political beliefs and building up their own walls that divide them from others. "Us" vs. "them". Someone getting mad that their food is not ready on time (when we know restaurants and cafe's are understaffed and the staff has been chronically overworked), road rage, the inability to listen to someone else speak. Then you go to the national news. Individuals literally getting away with murder, anger, a lack of justice. Then we span out to the global news. Thousands of people freezing on the boarder between Poland and Belarus, starvation, disease, corruption. All of this seems so far away when I'm reading about it all on my iPhone on a sunny day in Evergreen, Colorado. But really it’s just pure dumb luck that I'm not one of the millions of people living in survival mode day to day without food, shelter, protection, family. I can go on a run later today and not really be too concerned about any real danger. Then I click on the next article... I find myself reading about how Amazon and Starbucks are now getting together so customers in NYC do not have to interact with another human to get their morning coffee... no cashiers; you don't even have to make eye contact with someone or say 'good morning'. This new idea will apparently bring in a lot more money. It’s just a weird time to live in.

Rich Roll had an interesting guest on his podcast a while back. His guest was Rabbi Mordecai Finley (who interestingly enough is also a Jiu-Jitsu Blackbelt… most likely the only Rabbi who can claim this title). Personally, I would not say I am extremely religious in the sense I do not go to church on a regular basis. However, I have come to strongly believe in something greater than myself- a topic that can be delved into on a later day. Anyways, Rabbi Mordecai Finley is an interesting guy. He’s a spiritual psychologist, historian, philosopher and holds a doctorate in Religion and Social Ethics from the University of Southern California. It was a very interesting podcast that covered a lot. But at one point in their conversation Rich (always very well spoken in my opinion) says something like this:

“We live in a time that I would define as a crisis of consciousness and spiritual connection. We’re in this competitive, predatory relationship with other people, ourselves, with the world… it’s a zero sum approach to basically everything; we’re materialists seeking answers in ego, status, money, power, consumption, accumulation…

And it’s also a culture in which it’s considered a lower order naiveté to seek reconciliation or answers in the mystical and the unknown.. it’s almost perceived as a weakness in this age of science. Yet when you look around you see depression rates and suicide rates at unprecedented levels and you see this breakdown in the ability to civilly communicate with each other…

From my [Rich Roll’s] perspective the only way forward, the only salvation, is in spiritual practice. Learning to more deeply connect with who we are, find our innate humanity to connect to others and live more symbiotically with this planet that supports us… And yet I despair at times, because I don’t see this as a cultural priority”

I listened to this part (of the 2 hour and 17 minute long podcast) many times over the past month… and I’ve come to conclude, in my personal opinion, this is pretty much it. This separation, disconnection from one another and from our planet, is the root cause of our current chaotic, at times violent, individualistic, power and money hungry world.

With that being said... sure, I'm currently enrolled in a class called ‘Healthcare Finance’. I also am pretty excited to learn about this topic. When I’ve asked in the past why the healthcare system seems unfair or unnecessarily complex the answer generally always boils down to one thing. Something my dad has said a lot ‘follow the bouncing dollar’. And we’ve come to accept that as the answer a lot of the time... but it doesn’t seem to be working out too great. Sure, there are great things about living in a capitalist economy, and I'm not going to say I don't enjoy checking in on my investments. I've even become a bit fascinated with the whole cryptocurrency journey. But honestly (this may sound a little radical or naive).... why do we have this class ‘healthcare finance’ if we can all agree that health is a basic human right that should be independent of socioeconomic factors and political factors. Are we ok with treating the healthcare system like any other business? I know the answer to this is a long complex one... it basically boils down to something like ‘everyone needs money’… and I do get it. But at the same time, I started to read the news this morning and one of the first articles that I came across is titled ‘St.Jude Hoards Billions While Many of Its Families Drain Their Savings’… did these guys also take this ‘healthcare finance’ class? I don’t mean to sound bitter or sarcastic, but that’s a tough headline to read first thing in the morning before any caffeine consumption. And it's one about a hospital that treats children with cancer. Billions of dollars… that’s also just a lot of money. Then there's an article about how the U.S. recently broke a record for annual drug overdose deaths. Never before has the CDC reported over 100,000 deaths in just one year from drug overdoses alone. Well great. What are we doing about these things? Are other people reading this? Or is apple news just targeting me with depressing articles. Next up: climate change!

I would encourage anyone to go back and read that Rich Roll part again… maybe after reading their Sunday news before turning on the next football game (Patriots already played this week - and won). I know I went back to it.

"a crisis of consciousness and spiritual connection ... this competitive, predatory relationship with other people, ourselves, with the world ... the only way forward ... learning to more deeply connect with who we are, to find our innate humanity to connect to others and live more symbiotically with this planet … And yet I despair at times, because I don’t see this as a cultural priority”

Maybe getting every individual in the world to meditate or believe in some higher power is unrealistic or absurd. I’m sure more laws and regulations on top of some enticing financial incentives for large cooperations could help the situation somewhat. But to me it seems like palliative treatment for a malignant tumor.

I don’t think I can say it better than how Rich did in that podcast. I can’t help but think that if we only put as much effort into understanding one another as we do in disagreeing, and if we realized our individual lives are not so separate from those around us or from the planet we live on, perhaps our motives or goals would be different. Perhaps we would conduct ourselves differently in our every day lives, perhaps society would take a different course. Maybe some sort of connection to a universal consciousness would help a great deal.

There are people out there living their lives this way. I look up to these people and they provide inspiration that maybe we do not need to despair. These alpinists who connect to the mountains and nature, who are pushing themselves and humanity in ways never done before, while fully aware death is a highly probable outcome. They work with the mountains, as one. Or people like Paul Farmer who grew up on in a trailer park and despite graduating Harvard Medical School and getting a Ph.D. at Harvard chose to split his time between living in central Haiti with the poor and sick and living in a Boston 'slum' in a church rectory. All because he feels that his life's purpose is to be "a poor people's doctor" - he didn't know at the time that his company Partner's in Health would end up being so successful. Farmer works with these communities like he is one with them. Yet despite many stunning examples of selflessness, I share with Rich that sinking feeling that our "cultural priority" is headed in the wrong direction. But then I turn back to that Rumi quote I started off with. I’ll just end with just this one quote by John Steinbeck

“It is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious … is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricable to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus… a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things - plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets of the universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time” References: The Rich Roll Podcast. Episode #614 with Rabbi Mordecai Finley https://www.richroll.com/podcast/rabbi-mordecai-finley-614/ Armstrong, D. & Gabrielson, R. (November 12, 2021). St.Jude Hoards Billions While Many of Its Families Drain Their Savings. ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/article/st-jude-hoards-billions-while-many-of-its-families-drain-their-savings Stinchcombe, C. (November 18, 2021). The U.S. just broke a devastating record for drug overdose deaths. Self. https://www.self.com/story/drug-overdose-deaths-record All Things Considered. The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer. (October 20, 2003). NPR https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1472188