United we stand and divided we fall… This motto feels immensely powerful for me right now, I am noticing how divided we are becoming in our society, in our social groups, in our families. We have developed a culture of making people ‘wrong’.
Before I begin to explore this theme, I would like to stand up and acknowledge how much I do that. How if someone disagrees with me, I have to find a way to make them wrong, and not just their specific opinion, but I might go ahead and assassinate their entire character whilst I’m at it.
I recognise this in me and I want do it differently.
From governments, to global media, to school gates and offices, to tea with the folks and pints down the pub, everyone is sharing a judgement about someone else’s choice. The government are slowly defining more and more details about our personal choices, they are no longer just taking care of our roads and border safety, they wish to enforce protocols on healthcare, education, birthing rights and the minutiae of their current views on morality. This year alone, whether in the UK or within other westernised countries, the governments are withdrawing support for home-births, introducing mandated vaccines, supporting the patents of plant seeds (our food to be ‘owned’). On TV, we are bombarded with shows that require us to polarise our views, call in to make someone the winner or loser, right or wrong, talented or not. I have had people literally turn away from me because they have heard that I use homeopathy, because their judgement that it is ‘irrational science’ means that every other thought or opinion I hold is tainted by this wayward stance. Most recently, I felt shunned by a group of women because I expressed my disappointment of a toy store that seemed only to sell plastic toys, I was immediately categorised, from that fatal statement, as ‘one of those mums’.
When we look at the dawns of religion, the message we receive is that God, of whichever brand, gave us freewill. A believer or not, that is a truth, we all have choices and voices and the opportunity to live as we see fit. Yet, somewhere along the line we decided to create laws and rules and started this crescendoing avalanche of the ‘wrong factor’, somewhere along the line we decided to put someone else in charge of our decisions. We disempowered ourselves, we stepped out of accountability for our own actions and chose for someone else to be in charge.
But I hear you holler from the back, we need rules, we need moral codes, we need the structure otherwise it’s pure anarchy and chaos. I get that, I get the ‘need for it’, the fear of total pandemonium…. but perhaps there is another way.
Perhaps we can do some serious paradigm shifts and turn this world upside down, inside out and come out zen like on the other side… I remember reading a chapter of the Continuum Concept (by Jean Liedloff) where she talks about how a tribal village (still very separate from modern day philosophies) dealt with issues within their community. If someone had done something that was upsetting to the group, they would circle them, the whole village standing around the individual and they would spend hours if not days recounting their own personal, and most importantly, positive stories of that individual until they had remembered their true worth and value.
Isn’t that the nub of it? We aren’t born ‘wrong’ or evil or sinful, but full of the beauty of love and humanity. We don’t need rules to make us into good people, to keep us on the straight and narrow. We just need to be reminded sometimes that we are amazing, each and every one of us. So what if we try this, just one moment at a time? What if we all make a commitment to stop making each other wrong, to allow each of us our own paths and choices, to raise our children to know the value of themselves not the value of the rules? One step at a time…
I commit to acknowledging when I categorise someone else’s choice as wrong and I strive to alter my thinking to embrace each individual as just that, a unique, wholesome and inherently divine soul.
United we can stand.