What I’ll write below might not be something you agree with, and I’m okay with that. It’s not meant even slightly to hurt or disregard or disrespect anyone or their feelings.
If your opinion differs from mine, I wish to be a person to have nothing but respect for you, and to be able to some day learn from your worldview.
Now, here’s a few notes from what I’ve consumed and thought about so far around the topic of what it means to be a man and masculinity, and how that relates back to love and living life and fulfilment.
Let’s go!
Ultimately, we all want to live a peaceful and fulfilled life - right?
I believe that happiness, sadness are all emotions, that come and go, but peace and fulfilment can stay, and are a choice.
How in Hindi they say that your mann (heart) is chanchal (fleeting/wandering) versus when your mann (heart) is sthir (stable). To be stable, is to be peaceful, is to be in a state of dynamic equilibrium.
Not ‘static’ equilibrium, dynamic equilibrium.
That’s exactly how it exists in nature.
Things keep happening, but you stay unwavered, you stay the same.
Just like a buffer solution in chemistry set to maintain a certain pH.
No matter what acid or base you put in it, it knows how to ‘respond’ to come back it’s ‘intention’.
In terms of business, if being peacefull or achiving peace and fulfilment was an objective, then some degree of ‘alignment’ was be a key result, a quantitative way to asses if you achieved the objective.
What I meant to say is,
Alignment closely relates to bringing about peace.
If your inner structure is aligned and in-sync, in resonance with the outer external environment, then you (according to me) will move towards peace.
How so?
well, if you’re in alignment, you’ll have an internal model for how to respond, in order to remain ‘sthir’.
and this internal model doesn’t need to just be something like a motivational stoic statement like ‘only focus on what you can control.‘
while that can help greatly, the model can be much more abstract, subconscious, and multilayered.
Your perception/lens towards life and all it’s elements form your model. How you connect with the environment could be a part of your model. Anything that contributes to building a response of your ‘being’ towards anything outside of your ‘being’ becomes your ‘model’.
And how well that model works, i.e. is able to keep you stable or ‘sthir’ would I call - alignment, which would lead to peace.
For me fulfilment is just peace stretched out through time.
Great, so now we have established/assumed a few key things:
- In the end we all want peace and fulfilment.
- Peace and fulfilment is achievable by choice.
- It’s all about changing your internal ‘model’.
- When the internal ‘model’ is aligned, you should have built peace.
Part 2:
So then the question should be, what makes a model to be best aligned?
What kinds of models are best aligned?
What structures, beliefs and systems do they go by?
this is unfinished, coming up next is
- look inward
- look at biology
- look outward
- align with nature and your job in the natural system
- to serve
- to serve is to love
- to love is to serve
- to be alive is the highest form of service
- to be alive is to be present
- to be present is to love
- it either works on you and everyone, or on no one.
and in part 3, we’ll talk about
- To serve, to love to come alive, is all an act of courage.
- Life demands courage at all moments. It’s all just a leap of faith away.
what courage means to a man