To Walk with Love & Reverence
An authentic life is crafted because one or two people believe in a shared destiny wherein they live for a greater good.
Imagine being so easily swayed that you craft your life around other people’s doubts. Your fears are not original and your values have been corrupted. Many of us live in this state of compromise because we are not steadfast in our beliefs, often because we are not fully compelled by them.
To live authentically you must be faithful to your values, if not you will be led astray and find yourself on a path that is not your own. As Henry David Thoreau once said,
“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”
Still, it is easy to be dominated by the opinions of others, be it friends, family, or our enemies. Whether we recognize it or not, our value systems are often trampled upon by socialized ideas of right and wrong, regardless of tradition.
Modern man often fails to be consistent in his pursuit of virtue, both internally and externally, due to his inability to actualize an idea beyond speaking and writing.
Addicted to the quick fix provided by instant gratification, man is convinced to bend his knee despite personal beliefs telling him not to. If he was truly faithful to his God and respective virtues, he would not face the pressures of the external world with such apathy. In his failure of faith, he gives up on his belief system by paying his enemy.
David Samuels coined the term flatness in a piece for Tablet Magazine, where he explained the concept as being “cheap manufactured goods, Uber rides, bad take-out food … Airbnb and Tinder dates. People with professional credentials consume flatness as politics or as jobs in global banking.” Samuels goes on to suggest,
Flatness dialectically creates the world of identity politics, which are subsumed back into flatness, through the belief that words are only signs. Every word is the same as every other word. Flatness. The more flatness you consume, the richer the oligarchs who own the monopoly platforms get.
The embracing of flatness is the epitome of inauthenticity and complacency is often disregarded or outright denied. As we speak against the very people we fund, we can not admit our own hypocrisy and when confronted with it shy away from the truth. Instead of accepting the hardships that come with living by our values, we excuse ourselves by preferring comfort.
Commitment, struggle, and faith are no longer appreciated as they once were. Therefore, why live by your values or at that, have any unique aspirations? A beautiful destiny is no longer inspiring when you can exist in ignorance of societal ailments.
However, an authentic life is crafted because one or two people believe in a shared destiny wherein they live for a greater good. By not placing the individual at the center of the universe, we accept the hardships of life as a divine plan which we are compelled to further despite all odds.
To set out in pursuit of your own dreams is to be fully cognizant of your values, aside from outside voices.
“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.” - H.D.T.
Cover photo: The Storm (1880) by Pierre-Auguste Cot.
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