Why email can’t possibly meet our full humanity (and yes, I’m sending you an email): Living an Authentic Life, part 2
One part of leading an authentic life is about being conscientious with our body, and trying not to repetitively deceive our own physiology (see last month's post about artificial sweeteners, as well as a little update at the bottom*). But that is not the only place where we are being numbed into disconnection. A lot of our human authenticity is threatened by the way we connect to the outside world around us, especially the people we know and love. How do you communicate with them? How often do you feel that you have made a real connection? It's easy these days to do a lot of communicating, but not very much connecting.There is an important distinction between them—we can speak, write, or text a lot, but that doesn't mean that a real connection is being built. Other times—miraculously—we may not need to say very much, but feel that there is really good understanding and that a deeper connection develops. Those latter experiences are more rare, but also more valuable. So how do we create a space where we can really connect?
Artificial Sweeteners and What They Do to Our Humanity: Living an Authentic Life, part 1
Are you living a life of deprivation? Might seem like a strange question, as most people today are living in a world of such tremendous material abundance that it has no real historical precedent. People have never lived such complicated lives with so much stuff. There are, of course, scary times and hard situations when people do not have enough to eat or do not have a safe place to live, and unfortunately there are many places in the world right now where people are experiencing just this kind of desperation and loss. If you think about their lives very much, it is overwhelming. And sadly (but perhaps not so shockingly), it is very possible for most of us to go about daily life without giving it too much thought or too much worry. It becomes something we are aware of as a factual aspect of the news—one additional piece of information. It all becomes kind of abstract. How does that happen, that we can be connected to so much of the world and disconnected from it at the same time? What has been lost? Doesn't our loss of that capacity for real connection speak to another kind of inner, moral deprivation?