Ty Phillips challenges us to spend time each day reflecting instead of looking in the mirror or the camera lens.
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“Oh my god Becky, look at her butt!”
This iconic phrase is known by almost everyone that has any familiarity with American pop culture. While it may be a seemingly harmless song, it reflects a sentiment that is shared by the vast majority of the world’s population—looks matter. We spend billions on makeup, cover up, spray tans, gym memberships, and anti aging treatments because being old is seen as almost an insult.
We have created a culture that conceals aging and death, and rather than finding worth in the accumulated wisdom of age, places the elderly away in homes where they are neither seen nor heard.
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We have created a culture that conceals aging and death, and rather than finding worth in the accumulated wisdom of age, places the elderly away in homes where they are neither seen nor heard. We worship the face-lift and the tummy tuck.
Facebook and Instagram are littered with half-naked selfies, food shots, ab shots, butt shots, and gym talk, while teachers and intelligence are derided. We revel in our anti intellectualism because we are simply too beautiful to care. We raise our children on the latest trends, and even their food is marketed by the hottest star on the latest Disney program.
Meanwhile, 25,000 children under the age of five die every day. They are subject to such immense suffering in their short lives that the general pampered populace could neither fathom nor survive through something similar.
We spend millions on pills to cure us, diets to slim us, and celebrity doctors to direct our physical pursuits. Yet we are unwilling—almost as a whole—to start and end our days by sitting quietly for a few brief moments or to put even the briefest of efforts into correcting, training, and stabilizing the mind.
A recent study showed that the majority of people were more willing to subject themselves to painful electrical shocks than to sit in silence with their own minds. Let that sink in.
While we ponder that issue, remember, we will spend billions of dollars and countless hours of pain and suffering in order to glorify a temple that eventually leads to ruin, sagging, and years in a nursing home like those we have locked away and neglected. Yet we aren’t willing to care for our mental and emotional stability.
We limit and privatize education, leaving it all but inaccessible to everyone but the most affluent and all the while we are unable to sit, in a quiet room, alone with our own thoughts.
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We will fight over shoes but not a seat in a classroom (not that we should be fighting at all). We limit and privatize education, leaving it all but inaccessible to everyone but the most affluent and all the while we are unable to sit, in a quiet room, alone with our own thoughts.
What could change if we spent but a portion of the time and effort on our minds as we do on our bodies? Suppose we made selfies of community building, created portable water stations, and taught children hot to meditate instead of choosing to punish and medicate them thus suppressing their natural energies and inclinations?
Could we find peace in the world from something as little as teaching a child to respect the life of every sentient being, instead of playing war and smashing bugs? Could identity crises be eliminated simply by allowing a child to blossom in whatever direction they need? Suppose we allowed them to play with toys that were attractive to them and dress in clothes in which they felt comfortable, instead of trying to create less effeminate boys and more subservient good girls?
What if we spent our time studying scriptures—not to find what sets us apart, but for what unites us as a people? What if scientists had trading cards instead of sports players and intellect and compassion were rewarded instead of aggression and struggles for dominance?
What if, just what if, we made the choice to sit with our own emotions, in silence, just a few times a day, instead of constantly pursuing the need and rush for distraction from the only thing that is every present—the mind?
I challenge you to ask what if. I challenge you to ask and apply, to make a choice to give to someone—and to give to yourselves—moments of quiet reflection each and every day. To sit with the ups and downs, not in judgment, but in calm awareness. To pursue those moments of peaceful abiding with just as much passion as we do being seen at the gym.
And then … what if …
Photo—grimsanto/Flickr