HOW TO APPRECIATE YOURSELF

HOW TO APPRECIATE

AND UNDERSTAND YOURSELF

AND YOUR MANHOOD

IN 21^ST CENTURY AMERICA

The world in which we live strives to sell the life struggles and accomplishments of others, for compensation of course, as part of a capitalistic “Memoir Machine”.  But where does our culture find space and time to focus on and celebrate the ordinary man who is after all the archetype of the memoir machine.  For what makes the unbridled passions of other men appetitive to other men is the singular fact that their aspirations are so very similar to our own.  Memoirs whether written or virtual are supposed to be offerings laid upon the  gilded altar of all human lives dedicated to amazing human experiences by those who have led distinguished and extraordinary lives near to the closure of their own.  So the buy-in of early twenty-first century Americans who opt to worship the puerile and otherwise pedestrian events of people just like them appears to be part of the looky-loo, self-absorbed culture that has replaced Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Laura Facey’s sculpture, Redemption Song.  The first question is, “How much of ourselves do we lose by living through others”?  The second is, “Why have we so easily given up our passion to be organically extraordinary”?

Are selfies and Social Media pages the extent to which we can satisfy our manifest destiny?  Do they personify internal equilibrium and contentment?  Are they personalized, miniaturized vignettes of the reality programming we covet?  Do they or rather can they sufficiently convey the intrinsic, unscripted us in substantive ways that can never be captured by social media?  More appropriately let me ask yet another provocative question, “What is your soul about and in what tangible ways can the world be blessed by it”?  When your cup is full that is when it is time to spill it out unto the world.  When your cup is yet being filled, shaped, coloured, is the time to most enjoy its uniqueness in the world.  At that time, yet unfilled, it is not ready or really worthy for global consumption… but twenty-first century culture sells amoebic realities at the highest prices humanity can bear as if there are not more fitting, refined and elegant examples. 

The personal war humanity has been waging with twenty-first century culture has been to preserve its privacy and intimacy.  This is an unfortunate result of the sexual, social and political revolutions of the past 300 years in human history but to some well worth it.  Humanity has learned to appreciate itself by challenging and dismantling anachronistic ethical and moral structures that have taken 100,000 years to evolve.  As a tool for advocacy the individual has often chosen to become the icon of resistance.  Black nationalists during the mid-twentieth century donned a distinctive look and behaviour including their apparel and verbal communication.  Neo-Soul aesthetes adopted a unique style with naturalistic hair and funky clothing reminiscent of the 1970’s recycling slang such as hip and groovy and blood and main-man to add verisimilitude to the scene.  These were all positive affirmations answering James Brown’s call to “Say It Loud! I’m Black And I’m Proud”!  It can be argued that these movements were part of a larger epoch consolidating the cumulative energy of thousands of years of civil rights struggle wherein people no longer had to “Do Their Thang” in secret.  

The generations that have come to define the second half of the 20^th century and the first quarter of the 21^st are fully and legally capable of “Letting It All Hang Out”!  As I said, these people lived for their passions, fought, were beaten and died for them.  What socially forward passions are Americans willing to die for today?  What ideologically altruistic constructs are they so enamored of that they are willing to take the same personal risks to defend? So I am big on posing philosophically complex questions at my audience… here is another…  “How many times have you asked yourself, (and honestly answered), if you were doing something because it was an intrinsically beauteous passion or because everyone else was doing it”?  This is where we really have to make a clear distinction between public and private extrinsic and intrinsic.   We cannot ever hope to appreciate ourselves if we are unable to comprehend the simple threshold that defines the two.  A man has to know where he begins and ends and where the world around him, pressing him in, pushing him about, begins and ends.  He has to be the doorman controlling how to leak himself into the public and how much of the public he will allow to leak into him.  A man who has mastered this understanding of boundary and existence can only have done so by developing a strong, moral and ethical character identifying him as the medium through which history either is or is not moved positively forward.  To understand his intimate relationship with the public and private aspects of his manhood together with his innate responsibility to manage it for the betterment of humanity is the goal of constructive self-consciousness.  

So the selfies and the social media pages, the bling and VIP-isms of the 21^st century carry little weight compared to our understanding of who we really are in the private world of our self.  We have to turn away from the world and often in order to get us properly calibrated.  When adjusted properly the world is just the world but is it ever a world because we are such an integral part of it and we can see how intimately we affect it, we are irreplaceable.  So for my last question I want to ask you another compound question: “When was the last time you consciously mentally, physically, or otherwise stepped away from the world around you and took as much time as you needed to step into yourself?  What did you see there and how did you like what you saw? How committed are you to spend some time with self again and on a regular basis as a means of healing and positive orienting therapy? Only you can understand how to appreciate and understand yourself as a man in 21^st century America…

FIN

By Bigdaddy Blues