You are a once in a lifetime event & the political climate begs the question:
What will you do with it?
Last Tuesday, I arrived early to a spoken word open mic and chatted up one of the poets before the show. Per usual these days when someone talks to me, the conversation quickly turned existential.
“Do you believe in past lives?” I asked. She looked at me quizzically and gave a swift “no,” elaborating with a beautifully poetic response about humans being birthed from the remnants of stars, after what was essentially a giant universal “oops” of pure happenstance.
While I can’t recall her intriguing, fully fleshed out response, what I do remember is this core message: this life, this one, is all we have.
While I myself subscribe to the idea of reincarnation and view earth as a sort of “school” (one that is often incredibly twisted and terrifying, more akin to the Upside Down than the brick-and-mortar varieties we send our children off to), I absolutely agree with her sentiment that we have one life. Leave it to a Gemini to be able to excitedly and effortlessly entertain both sides of this cosmic coin.
Yes, this life is the only one you get. This one as you exist within this current reality, this present moment. The microcosm of you within the macrocosm of the modern day in which you live. You as you in this life will never come again. Even if you, like I, believe we’ve been here many times, learning our lessons (and often not learning our lessons), you can’t argue the fact that you will never happen again.
You are a once in a lifetime event. Your body, your name, your experiences, your identity, the time in which you get to live – all of it is unique to this precise life, as the you that you are.
You will never again be this exact expression of stardust and matter, having these exact experiences, facing these exact challenges, living this exact life. And it is for that reason that we must give it all we’ve got – now more than ever.
Whether we’ve been here once or a billion times is irrelevant to actually living. It’s fun to think about, but the crux of the matter is that we’re here to do just that: live. With the political climate and state of the world being what it is, with all of us bearing witness to genocide in real time, we must redefine what it means to truly live and to be free. Unfortunately, present day society and its deeply rooted problematic systems make these incredibly challenging, but I believe that we, as the human race, are capable of great change.
We must be willing to question and think differently. We must practice the art of perspective.
If we ever want to abolish these oppressive systems that keep us locked in our various cages (be it mental or very, very physical), we must examine what we have been taught about everything – religion, identity, society, politics, history. What is acceptable? What is good? What is right? What is just? How have our beliefs shaped who we have become? Who has influenced those beliefs? Are they true for us? Are they even ours?
While we are at a critical moment in history, we also have an incredible opportunity. So many worldwide, myself included, are fed up with the hidden agenda of those in power, in tech, in media, who have been pulling the strings for years, maintaining (and heavily influencing) the status quo to make a buck (or a billion) off our backs and continually silencing anyone that objects. Add this to the relentless bombings in Gaza, a Molotov cocktail of divisive rhetoric, and the growing volatile emotional state of humanity and you get a worldwide powder keg that will either change the course of history for the better or it will blow us all away.
We must be willing to keep raising our voices. We must be willing to see through the facades. We must be willing to unlearn. We must be willing to widen our perspective. We must be willing to hold nuance and shift the trajectory towards equality and acceptance.
We must be willing to do the difficult and deep inner work first on ourselves as individuals if we ever want to make lasting change within the collective.
We must take a magnifying glass to history and examine it in depth with fresh perspective. We must be objective. We must strip back the layers of our past and sift through the pain in our hands – generational, ancestral, and individual. We must be willing to speak up when we see injustice. We must be willing to grow and stay open to ideas and new ways of thinking. We must push for momentum in an entirely new direction. We must make an impact for the greater good. We must strive to leave this world better than we found it.
The war has divided us, but it cannot divine us.
Too many have lost their lives but you are still a powerful being with a strong spirit that has known the truth all along. A mind can be influenced but a heart is not so easily undone. You have a choice. Question your thoughts. Question your beliefs. Learn the quiet language of heart-speak. Place your bets and go all in on rekindling humanity.
War has never worked.
It never will.
That has been shown time and time again. We must be willing to think, act and be different; to seed ideas of possibility; to simply choose differently.
Above all else, now more than ever, we must remember our humanity. You get one life, and this is it. Make it count. Redefine what it really means to live.