Mind Set Go

D.C. street artist, Mark Jenkins, stated, “Adventure is a path.  Real adventure—self determined, self-motivated, often risky—forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world.  The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it.  Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness.  In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind—and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both.  This will change you.  Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.”  Writer and stylist Joan Didion reminded us (way back in 1961 in a chance Vogue article she unexpectedly had the opportunity to write) that “character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” 

The changes brought about by acknowledging and living a path of real adventure and accepting “responsibility for one’s own life” may not be where many of us want to go.  Not because it is unattainable or difficult.  Many of us don’t want change, and we don’t want to change.  I mean, can we simply open our minds and hearts to taking the path of real adventure, accepting “responsibility for own’s own life” and the changes that might bring?  Or do we, rather, enjoy grappling in perhaps mindless, everyday activities that distract us from what Jenkins refers to as “firsthand encounters with the world”?

If humanity were to only be conceived of as a dichotomy of “limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty,” and if humanity were only capable of extremes, just how could balance and harmony ever hope to exist?  Adventure is a path, and humans can take responsibility, for not only one’s life, but for the effects responsible or irresponsible decisions, actions or inactions bring about.  Living the adventure, taking risks, taking responsibility, acknowledging interconnectivity and third order effects are what humans, if not naturally occurring, need to be taught to do.  Perhaps in a rapidly changing society, in which change can be conceived as out of control, the extremes are vivid and stark?  What ever happened to the in-betweens, and did they ever or do they presently, exist at all?

Think for a moment of limitless kindness.  Can you imagine it?  Limitless kindness? 

And oh, bottomless cruelty… the kinds we are so familiar with from horror movies and the like.  Which of the two are we more familiar?  I would dare to say that bottomless cruelty is openly portrayed in movies and announced in the news in over abundance.  It certainly exists.  But limitless kindness?  Where are the actual examples of that? 

We are left living in a world, one in which we can embark on real adventure, armed with stark examples of bottomless cruelty at every turn.  While we may be capable of both limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty, how does one find balance and discover ways to find self-respecting responsibility when armed with daily doses of humanity’s cruelty—which certainly exists? And where, oh where, is any sense of middle-ground?

Welcome to the 21^st century.  Humanity is numb.  Numb to disasters.  Numb to kindness.  Numb to war.  Numb to the ability to take responsibility.  To evoke change.  To embark on real adventure.  And this report, is more of the black and white reality that things cannot and will not ever be the same again.

But all is not lost.  Kindness exists.  Kindness can prevail.  Kindness is primal.  Not all is forgotten.  Kindness is free and obtainable.  Kindness is ours for the taking, even without asking.  And kindness isn’t black or white.  Kindness is all colors, equal.

Welcome to the 21^st century.

Nancy Marie Farley Rice