After covid, I had decided being home was indeed my happy place. But as the years pass, I often hear 'Tilly, you need to get out more', in response to my utter confusion for how things seem so contrary to my to what I know and understand. So I did, returning to activities I abandoned a long while ago. I have spent weeks participating and harboring in what others see, and I refer to, as the real world.

I walked the streets of three of the largest urban areas in two states. I drove a rent a car, rode buses, traveled by transit train, and boarded two airplanes to visit family and friends. I stayed in a motel, an airbnb, and several guest rooms, motivating the appropriation of ear plugs to sleep.

I enjoyed Bruckner's symphony #4 and Saint-Saëns piano concerto #5. I saw the opera Carmine, recreated to my dismay. Good coffee drinks were hard to come by; restaurant food was expensive, no matter what the cultural choice. And though I never considered myself a foodie, I am a food critic now.

Opportunity enabled making new friends and meeting new family and I found visiting with others quite splendid. I worked and played, went shopping, and sat around, fully engaged myself in 'the real world' USA.

Much to my surprise, I arrived home more perplexed and uneasy than before I left, seeing and experiencing more abstraction of aberration than I could have imagined staying home and simply conversing with others and reading articles and news. Finding myself in a real contemplative state, I began reevaluating human society and their direction. Things were much like they used to be, but so much more, more of everything.

After much investigation and deep thought, piecing together what I know and comparing current human behavior with that of the past, this is where I have landed, which also solidifies my life's choices and future plans: stay where I am at, my world, and do what I do best, engaging in my realities close to home.

Society's lessons:

Human lives shape human natures. Today sparks tomorrow as societies move from one day to the next, every environment and exposure influencing human maturity and evolution, while fabricating the aspects in which life continues. 

Humans have forever imprinted their minds with faith-based ideologies, defining behavior and limiting imagination. Mythology to Scientology, dogma and ritual guides human action with the grace or indignation of God/s. Numerous constructs include parameters for the extreme preservation of human life and the justifications for human death, avowing hostility and war when adhered to faith. Countless leaders and philosophers abided these tenets, constraining the boundaries of human pursuit. Nonetheless, they endure and represent humanity's only real plan.

Every action of humankind cannot be undone. Similar to words of anger, once said, they are embossed on the minds of those listening. Humans perpetually rewire the most complex organism--the human brain--to satisfy want and instill hope for the organism it dominates, contouring human attitudes and actions without regard to the actual sustenance our species demands.

Humans contemplate and theorize most everything, from searching for an understanding of the evolutionary processes of natural selection to observing the overall nature of all species' pursuit for reproduction. We have recognized the intricate roll organisms play in the Earth's scheme: trees communicate, moles aerate, bees pollenate... We have learned how small organisms dominate larger ones. We can predict the weather, travel to the moon, and communicate to the other side of the world, propelling humans in to a once inconceivable arena of accomplishment.

Nevertheless, I have to ask. Why do we expend so much effort investigating humans and their world to then disregard so much of what we learn. We still promote unhealthy foods, harmful supplements, and medicines that cause disease, while knowing they all produce alterations in genetic expression and species reproduction. We know how to reduce the odds of getting cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, yet they remain the nation's leading causes for death. We continue to waste water, pollute air, and devour resources well after understanding the Earth and atmosphere have their limits. Nowhere in humanity's single plan discourages following the money, even though it facilitates and perpetuates further disability and challenges to humans and the Earth.  

Limiting our existence to only one plan has put the Earth and its inhabitants in chaos and at risk of total extinction. We just do, do as we please at whatever the cost, praying for even more--more coin, more fun, more stuff, more time to live--while eden is held to the next life. What could possibly motivate us to invent to annihilate, while embodying a hope of something beyond life on Earth, creating societies facing centuries of humanity's volition. Focusing on an unknown and following the money without reverence to this life delineates the possibilities of alturistic human growth and condones the present world genocide.

                                                                                                   ...To Be Continued

For more thoughts on humanity, turn a few pages in book one, The Cat Searching for an Open Window, part one and three of The Human Nature of Need and Feed - finding wellbeing.