Moment to breathe

The early bird gets the worm…

At times I have wondered,

“Poor worm”. I should offer warnings, “A slow worm is eaten by a bird.”

Really?

We were sitting under a palm-thatched roof one afternoon, a Buddhist monk who sells coconuts by the ocean’s side, and I, when he asked, “why does your culture work so hard? No time to rest, or for family, or ceremony?”

The apparent story for the invention of the computer was to make work more efficient, so to create a 4-day working week. Instead, we have only shunted our so-called productivity into hyperdrive. Most shops are open Sundays now, some even Christmas and New Year, the few calendar days we initially allowed for pause.

A planet going “retrograde” in astrology is a fundamental part of the clockwork in that ancient science. Although, yes, the earth is not the center of the solar system, nor do the planets go backward.

However, the mere perspective of the planet retracing its steps giving the illusion, equal to that of when you are overtaking a car on the highway and for a moment it appears the car beside you is going backward, it allows for a moment of assessment.

It is similar when trekking along a mountainside. You pause for a moment and gaze back to see from where you have come and gain a perspective, so as to not become completely lost in the one-direction view.

Cultures throughout every age have had their immediate connection to their local endemic ecosystem and within that their own sacred, nutritional, recreational, plants that were frequently or occasionally consumed. Ranging from sacred corn to hash cults, to daily opium or datura smoking. There has never been a global standard to reference the appropriate state of mind.

Ours, the runaway freight train known as the west, has been of course none other than the highly addictive caffeine. Found in every town, in some towns it is found every third shop, and at a strength of your neurons desire. This central nervous system stimulant is of course the accepted and highly regarded drug of choice due to its capacity to prevent our heads slamming onto the work desk in a narcoleptic fashion, due to the excessive squeezing of our adrenals, in vain of some finish line.

Although many love the apparent sensory enhancement effects of caffeine, studies have found that one cup of coffee reduces cerebral blood flow to the brain by an average of 27%.

The most simple way to decide whether a plant, or action, or anything, is sustainable or not, is to observe traditional cultures. The types of nutrients or compounds ingested, the amount, the frequency, and so on. In a tribe or nation of only a few hundred or thousand, any activity that is going to negatively influence its peoples is not going to be maintained, by virtue of the mere fact of survival and the continuation of proceeding generations. Anything outside of the cycle of sustainability is inevitably moving toward a singularity.

Im not here to beat up coffee, although I am kind of… The intention of this article is more so to induce a questioning, such as that which was first posed by the coconut selling monk.

What if we didn’t get it done by tonight, and simply allowed ourselves to be tired?

Paused and questioned the constant craving…

And even let go of our culturally conditioned ideas that are clearly eroding our evolutionary homeostatic state, as banks of habitat are in a raging flood...?