Is your life institutionalized?
Some many of us are institutionalized. We live our lives as if we are on a long distance flight. I am travelling from Heathrow to Auckland via LA. My, doesn’t that feel good. I am going somewhere you want to go, on a route you would like to follow.
But that isn’t life. That is sitting in a sardine can for awfully long time doing what we are told.
In real life, we set out, much like Dick Whittington and his cat. We are going to London. We don’t have a map. In truth, we aren’t really sure that London exists. But we know we are going.
How do you cope with the muddled narrative of an open ended adventure?
Because we are going, but are quite sure where and how, when people ask us what we are doing, we sound muddled. During the journey, we know what we have just left and what we have just seen. We know the obstacles that face us right now and that might bring our entire project to an end. People expect to hear our destination and our route. Without an institutionalized storyline, we sound disjointed!
If our story is clear, it is yesterday’s action!
It is only at the end of the journey that we can tell the whole tale and give it a beginning, middle and an end.
I am still tidying this blog and re-sorting posts I wrote as much as two yeas’ ago. Each post has been about something I did during that day, or read, or thought.
As a I look back, I am amazed. Did I really get involved in that and did we think that clearly? It seems so.
And example of looking back in wonder
Here is a post from over 18 months ago in the aftermath of the March 2008 election when Zimbabweans around the world were in a hiatus without widely accepted election results. We were writing to the late President Mwanawasa of our neighbours, Zambia, who was chairman of SADC at the time. SADC is the southern African equivalent of the G20.
- We were involved.
- We were imaginative.
- We were positive.
Beat that can you? I am impressed with us. This is a fantastic case study of positive psychology of collection action in dire times.
But note at the time, this post got hardly any attention. Yet, what we were doing was quite revolutionary at so many levels. Real life is muddled. Real life is unpracticed.
When it is smooth, when it is definite, it is not real life. It is just the unthinking sleepwalking of institutional existence.
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