We had tastes of normalcy this week.
My sons played and watched music; viewed, talked about, and interacted with art; and made some art of their own.
I was reminded of how much the term “essential” has been misused in recent months. The arts were discarded for orbitrary biological necessities.
To live is to learn amd adapt. It is not to eat and sanitize. An animal knows precisely how much food it needs and how clean its body needs to be.
Humans have souls and minds that need to be nourished no less than their bodies.
Our obsession with Science has turned the trinity of our existence into a hierarchy of convenience. We have gotten very good at observing and explaining the physical world, so that becomes a comfort zone for us, a place for experts to tell us what our body needs while ignoring the mind and soul. We boast a bit of knowledge about the mind, so it gets a place in the hierarchy just below the body. Many reduce the mind to a physical phenomenon, nesting it neatly in our familiarity with the material.
The soul doesn’t fit into our obsession with the concrete. It can’t be summarized in a textbook. It can’t be generalized and categorized. We can only understand it on an individual basis. Science can help, but it can’t find the answers we seek.
We found a little more balance this week. We had homemade smoothies; pushed our bodies on the jiu-jitsu mats; learned about the Holocaust, Caravaggio, and cinematography; and and fed our souls with yoga, prayer, music, and art.
As tricky as it may seem, it can be made simple: the learning lifestyle is primarily learning about yourself. As you nourish yourself, you will expand your understanding of the physical, non-physical, inner, and outer aspects of existence.
God bless, I appreciate and thank you,
Jason
